North Carolina State Auditor Beth Wood, a CPA with decades of experience
in both public service and private practice, announced today that she intends
to seek re-election to that office. Her first term was spent fulfilling
a two-part plan to improve both audit efficiency and audit quality. She
plans to continue these improvements in her second term.
“I promised to be the people’s full-time financial watchdog,
and I spent the first two years of my term improving audit quality,” Wood
states. “My goal was to produce audits with irrefutable findings,
so the Governor and General Assembly would have all the information
they need to make proper decisions.”
“So far, we have identified waste and opportunities for additional
revenues in the amount of $248M. This number would have been considerably
higher, but several audits found the data unavailable to adequately quantify
the waste. We are making great headway,” Wood states, “However,
I am running again because there is much yet to do.”
Under Beth Wood,
the Office of the State Auditor is:
- Aggressively taking audit reports
to the General Assembly for legislative action; this has resulted in
a number of bills being passed.
- Performing follow-up on previously performed
audits to make sure agency remedies are in place and working.
The Office has identified numerous poor contracting
practices, revealing hundreds of millions of dollars of waste over the last
decade. For example, since 1997, the State of North Carolina had been paying,
for inmate medical care that should be covered by Medicaid or Medicare, five
times more than those agencies would pay. As a result of the audit the State
has saved millions of dollars.
Additional audits also revealed that the state
is spending 6-10 million dollars a year conducting evaluations that are not
adequately performed. Several of these audits resulted in new legislation created
to correct the wasteful spending.
Wood stresses that audits can also be performed
more efficiently, so the resulting information is timely and therefore more
useful.
