The House committee investigating the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021, has announced plans for another public hearing and this time, former Vice President Mike Pence may even be invited to testify.
The notion that a former vice president could reveal information about the blatant disregard for the democratic process by others inside our federal government sounds like something out of a movie. But this is reality right now for the American Experiment.
And this current assault on democratic principles is not just a U.S. story. From last year’s military coup in Myanmar to the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, recent disturbing events have shown us how fragile democracy truly is.
We are in a vicious cycle in which distrust in government is fueling efforts to weaken the institution. A diminished government has fewer resources to stop waste, fraud, and abuse—and trust erodes more, intensifying the political divide between those who see government as ineffective and those who want to strengthen it.
Our founding principles are in such a fragile state that scores of media outlets now identify democracy as a core coverage area, and reporters are delving as never before into topics like voting, gerrymandering and political violence. They are joined by academics, pro-democracy foundations, think tanks and, indeed, government policy makers in theorizing about how we have arrived at the current state of near civil war.
These investigations into institutional wrongs and democratic backsliding are important. But pundits are overlooking an important structural and institutional support for democracy: the auditors charged with holding the people who run our governmental institutions accountable.
From public safety to government contracting to child welfare, auditors have the authority to conduct independent and objective assessments of how programs are being managed and whether they are serving the public interest.
In short, auditing is about evaluating the use of both money and power; how these are used defines the relationship between a government and its constituents. That relationship suffers when the people who run government make decisions based on their own or other special interests and not those of their citizens. Therefore, auditors can be a powerful institutional asset to restore trust by not just exposing problems but in holding their government counterparts responsible for making things right.
In 2020, when city management in El Cerrito, California, said the pandemic had depleted finances and that only massive spending cuts or tax hikes could resolve the situation, taxpayers were suspicious. After all, the city had long been flagged on the California State Auditor’s dashboard of cities in distress. The state auditor investigated and in 2021 found that city officials had failed to curb overspending even as revenues began to fall years before the pandemic, nearly sending the city into bankruptcy. The auditor’s report contained a slew of recommendations, including establishing monthly fiscal updates and reducing excessively high salaries.
Structural inequalities and systemic racism have also broken open major fault lines in society, and the pandemic has further exacerbated those disparities. In response, social equity has increasingly become part of the modern auditing paradigm. The federal Government Accountability Office — which sets the standards for the government auditing profession — recently added equity to its list of audit considerations. Last year, racial inequities identified in audits of the Seattle probation system and how well Long Beach, California’s library system was serving the city’s ethnically and socioeconomically diverse communities prompted meaningful changes.
But the role of the so-called activist auditor has its limits. Politics may not influence an auditor’s approach, but it can affect how auditors’ offices are funded. Few auditors are truly independent in this respect, and their resources to act in the public’s interest may be constrained by a disgruntled council or mayor. Even the GAO, the nation’s most powerful auditor, is limited to pursuing inquiries as requested by Congress.
This isn’t the case in other democracies. The European Union has long recognized the importance of an external and independent auditor as a hallmark of democracy. In South Africa, the auditor general’s independence and mission of strengthening democracy is enshrined in the country’s constitution.
In the U.S., it’s time to move beyond exhortation and start looking at structural and institutional supports to democracy and ways to strengthen them. There are already models around the world that we can follow. The World Bank’s index of independence of national-level audit organizations provides a template for strengthening auditing at all levels of government
“Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” Abraham Lincoln famously proclaimed. If we want to build trust in our institutions and protect democracy, that must include empowering our auditors to ensure that our governments are truly working for the people they purport to serve.