Senate leader says audit shows lack of transparency and accountability under Gov. Stitt

“When we’re using taxpayer funds, be they federal, state or local, we’ve got to take it seriously,” said Treat, R-Oklahoma City. “And I think this report underscores that this administration hasn’t taken it as seriously as they should have.”

Treat was joined by Sen. Roger Thompson, R-Okemah, in his support of the report and conclusions released Tuesday by State Auditor and Inspector Cindy Byrd.

“She’s proving herself to be a good auditor,” said Thompson, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

In addition to questioning at least $30.5 million in expenditures, Byrd alleged that Oklahoma has become a “no-bid state” through the Oklahoma Office of Management and Enterprise Services’ use of a new set of rules it calls “rolling solicitation” for choosing vendors.

As a result of the findings from the federally mandated examination of $13 billion in expenditures for fiscal year 2022, Attorney General Gentner Drummond granted Byrd’s request for an investigative audit so her office can more deeply probe OMES’ handling of contracting and procurement policies.

Drummond also called for the resignation of Stitt Cabinet Secretary Shelley Zumwalt, who has led three different state agencies. The audit questions Zumwalt’s failure to disclose that her husband is vice president of an Oklahoma City software company that was paid millions of dollars by a state agency she ran.

Zumwalt has said she will not step down.

“There are those who say that she’s political in some areas. I’ve not seen that. I trust her numbers,” Thompson said about Byrd.

Thompson said Byrd’s concerns about Zumwalt’s apparent conflict of interest should take into consideration the situation during the time Zumwalt was head of the Oklahoma Employment Security Commission. Zumwalt served at the commission during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Thompson said that might be why the agencies involved were using “rolling solicitations” rather than following the Oklahoma Central Purchasing Act, which requires competitive bidding.

“I never, ever want to do anything to harm taxpayer dollars,” Thompson said. “I think we need to protect those. We need to do the bids. However, we were in a situation that none of us had ever lived through.”

Rep. Regina Goodwin, D-Tulsa, said the amount of money that OMES is alleged to have misused was disturbing. “When these pandemic relief dollars were handed out without proper accountability, thousands upon thousands of taxpayers lost out,” she said.

Rep. Jon Echols, R-Oklahoma City, thinks the findings deserve a closer look from the Legislature.

“We’ve created an agency that can dig into these things,” said Echols. “Now that we have LOFT, that is a great arm to look into those things that the auditor suggested.”

LOFT, the Legislative Office of Fiscal Transparency, was created in the 2019 legislative session through a bill authored by Treat.

Treat says he was already aware of some of the issues addressed in the audit due to a previous report from LOFT.

“We allowed the governor to administer those (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security) Act funds on his own without legislative interference, and we saw that he was doing it in a very incompetent manner,” said Treat. He said this is why the Legislature decided to distribute federal American Rescue Plan Act funds entirely through a legislative committee.

The Governor’s Office declined to comment on the audit and did not respond to questions about Treat’s statements.

House Speaker Charles McCall also did not respond to questions about the audit.

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