The Rundown with Kansas Legislative Division of Post Audit

The Rundown - Trailer

July 15, 2019 Legislative Post Audit
The Rundown with Kansas Legislative Division of Post Audit
The Rundown - Trailer
Show Notes Transcript

A preview of Kansas Legislative Division of Post Audit's new podcast series, "The Rundown."  In this inaugural episode, Justin Stowe, Legislative Post Auditor sits down with host Andy Brienzo, Principal Auditor at LPA, to discuss the work LPA does and why adding podcasts is important to communicating the audit's findings.

Andy Brienzo:

From the Kansas Legislative Division of Post Audit, this is The Rundown, your source for news and updates from LPA, including performance audits recently released to the Kansas Legislature. I'm Andy Brienzo. Regular listeners of LPA's podcasts are likely aware that until now we've been recording summarized versions of our audit reports. This podcast marks the inauguration of LPAs new p odcast series, The Rundown, which will feature interviews with the supervisors of our audit reports as those reports are released. The Rundown w ill also have the occasional special episode, however, in which I'll be interviewing other members of LPA staff on a variety of topics. To kick off our new series, I've invited Justin Stowe, the Legislative Post Auditor to join me in the recording studio. Justin, welcome and thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule.

Justin Stowe:

Andy, glad to be here.

Andy Brienzo:

So why don't you start off by providing a brief overview of LPA and the work that we do?

Justin Stowe:

Sure, so we are the audit arm of the Kansas Legislature and what that means is that we audit a variety of state and local governments. That work fa lls i nto three general categories. So the first and most common type of audit work that we do ar e c a lled p erformance audits. And those audits have us evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of government. So as you can imagine, that covers a wide variety of topics and concerns that the legislature may have. Efficiency oriented audits sometimes have us look at the potential consolidation of executive branch agencies or boards. The effectiveness focus of performance audits might hav e us look at, for example, how well the foster care program is working and whether children are being placed effectively in homes that are safe and that are nurturing for them so the y ca n, it can be very numbers driven. It can also be a lot more qualitative, looking at just the quality of Kansas state and local government. The second type of audit we do this, these are a little, a smaller portion of o ur work, but still very important are IT security audits. So that has us evaluating the security protocols and state agencies to make sure that they are taking the necessary steps, to keep, Kansas taxpayer and residents' information private and safe. And so, as you can imagine, there a re a vast number of state agencies that hold a lot of different types of sensitive information. That c ould be anything from a Kansas resident's social security number and birthdate, but it can also get much more nuanced and much more risky than that, including their tax information, their criminal history, those types of things. So i t's an important component of the work w e do, making sure that state government is securing that information properly. And then finally, we, we haven't yet begun this work, but we will be soon. The legislature passed a law that will have us evaluating economic development tax incentives. And so that will have us looking at a variety of different types of tax and some structures that could be t ax i ncentive programs but can also be exemptions and credits, increment tax fi nancing s t ructures, all sorts of things that we'll be looking at to evaluate whether those are designed to ensure that we are getting a good return on our investment. We work for the Legislative Post Audit Committee that is a 10 member bipartisan committee, a joint committee, so it's g ot five members of the Senate and five members of the House. It includes six members from the majority party and four members from the minority party. And at their direction, we tend to perform 12 to 15 audits a year.

Andy Brienzo:

So in light of that work and the service LPA provides to the Kansas legislature, why record podcasts?

Justin Stowe:

It's a good question. The bottom line is that we want to make our audit work more accessible to the legislature, and to members of the public. So from the legislature's perspective, we know that legislators are very, very busy individuals and that t hey're just flooded with information from numerous sources. So the idea behind p odcasts is that we c ould get that message out, get the audit findings out in a more accessible manner so that it g ives them another, an alternative to sitting down and reading a 30 or 40 page report and all the detail that comes with that. We're also aware that because we're in Kansas, a very rural state, that we have a lot of legislators who are driving frequently from their homes to Topeka, the State Capitol and figured that podcasts would be an efficient way for them to access the findings a nd our reports. It would allow them to kill some time on those long drives and be more familiar with what we do. And then finally, I think it just makes good sense in terms of return on in vestment. So we sp ent a lot of time on these audits and so a podcast, it takes a very short amount of time, relatively speaking and just gives us one more way to put our message out there to communicate the results of all of our hard work. And at that point in the audit just, I think makes good sense from that perspective.

Andy Brienzo:

So what do you hope our listeners will get out of the new interview based format of The Rundown?

Justin Stowe:

Mostly I'm hoping that'll be a more engaging way to learn about our work. So as you know, audit work is by nature complicated, it's nuanced, it's very detail driven and I think that it's a very necessary component of our work. It's fundamental to the type of work that we do but that does make it hard to sometimes engage with the results of our work. And so I think that the interview based format will allow people a different view into what we do and give them a chance to absorb the contents of our findings in a way that's maybe a little bit more relatable and a little bit more natural than sitting down and reading a very lengthy and complicated report.

Andy Brienzo:

Justin Stowe is the Legislative Post Auditor. Justin, thanks again for taking the time to join me in th e s tudio.

Justin Stowe:

Glad to be here.

Andy Brienzo:

Thank you for listening to The Rundown. To make sure you never miss an episode of our new series subscribe on Spotify or Apple podcasts. For more information about Legislative Post Audit and our audit reports, visit our w ebsite a t www.kslpa. org and follow us on Twitter@ksaudit.