Austin City Council unanimously approved a ordinance on Thursday, directing the city auditor to establish a recurring program of comprehensive efficiency assessments for all city departments. In other words, a regular internal audit.
The ordinance states: “The city auditor shall initiate and oversee a program of recurring comprehensive efficiency assessments designed to address cost effective performance improvements of all other City departments on a repeating schedule with at least three years between assessment cycles.”
Austin Mayor Kirk Watson said during Thursday’s regularly scheduled city council meeting, “It’s both a back to basics and a modernization of local government, and that’s really important because it arises out of a determination for us to safeguard public confidence.”
Despite the new internal efficiency assessment process, Austin voters will probably see a proposal for an external audit on the November ballot. Matt Mackowiak, co-chair of Save Austin Now, a nonpartisan group working to place the external audit measure on the ballot, criticized the internal approach. “It’s really the fox is guarding the hen house. An external audit is what we need and the reason that an external audit is valuable is you don’t have any conflicts,” he said. Mackowiak added, “An internal audit is not the way that you rebuild trust between taxpayers and city leaders.”
Save Austin Now previously rallied against Proposition Q, a 20 percent property tax increase that Austin voters overwhelmingly rejected last year.
District 10 Councilmember Marc Duchen proposed the internal citywide efficiency assessment last year. He was the only city councilmember to vote against putting Prop Q on the ballot last year, and ran for election on a economic platform. In a statement, he wrote, “It’s high time we brought City Hall’s spending under control, and this is an important step in that direction.” In a phone interview with me, Duchen said of the internal audit ordinance, “My hope is that it would be enough to satisfy voters we don’t want to duplicate any of them, that would be more money spent.”
I asked Mackowiak about the cost of not one, but two audits – one that is by city ordinance and the other, voter-approved. Mackowiak acknowledged that dual audits could add costs if both an internal program and a voter-approved external review happen. However, he justified the expense. “If it costs a few hundred thousand dollars to get a serious look at our budget to figure out how we can be more efficient, how we can root out waste, fraud, duplication, I think 9 out of 10 taxpayers would take that ratio of something like $100 million in savings,” he said.