Reprinted from

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Otto strives for efficiency in office

By Dana Yost - Independent Editor
 

MARSHALL - When she was preparing to assume the office of state auditor, Rebecca Otto worked on the transition with outgoing auditor Pat Anderson.

One of the things Anderson told Otto was that she should expect a lot of interest in the state’s annual report on municipal liquor stores.

“She said it was the most popular report, and I said, ‘come on, liquor stores?’” Otto said Tuesday during a visit in Marshall. “Of course, it was.”

One of the first public reports Otto’s office issued was the annual liquor store report on Feb. 2. But her version of the report, she says, reflects the way she wants to run the auditor’s office - with more user-friendly information and online access and graphics, and more direct communication with local units of government.

That was what brought her to Marshall on Tuesday in the midst of bad weather - she met with the staff of the auditor’s Marshall office for the first time. It was actually her third trip to southwest Minnesota in the past couple of weeks. She had also been to Fulda and attended a DFL convention Saturday night at Jackpot Junction.

She said it’s important to talk with local officials and make sure her rural staffers understand her vision for the office and some of the changes she is making to make it more efficient.

“It is going very, very well,” Otto said of the transition. “We have a highly professional staff that takes the job very seriously. The state is in great hands with the staff we have.”

Along with making reports more readable to the general public, she wants them more user-friendly for lawmakers, as well, in the hopes they’ll be good resources during the legislative session.

She said she’s trying to change audit reports from being just transcriptions of figures or criticisms of local government to providing meaningful, non-partisan analysis.

One goal is to have her staff keep local units of government up to date on changing accounting standards, and to have her office provide proactive and preventative assistance - rather than simply catching mistakes or wrongdoing after the fact.

“That makes for more efficient use of government,” Otto said.

She said new accounting standards constantly are “popping up, and we have to be able to help the locals deal with that. That’s where I see my leadership as being important.”

She said that if she can help local governments be more efficient, it could help the state’s overall economic performance. She said she’s getting concerned that the state keeps dropping in several national economic and education rankings, including job growth and employment.

She says the Legislature and state officials need to work with educators and local government leaders to ensure a good business climate. That means everything from turning out well-educated graduates, to better roads for businesses to ship their goods.

“I think we have a great state and we want to keep it that way,” she said. “But we do have many challenges facing us ... but we know how to do these things. It just takes a lot of leadership.”

She said she’s trying to establish open lines of communication with local government officials, and encourages their phone calls or their visits to the Web site. She is posting regular “e-updates” on the auditor Web site, along with what she hopes are easier-to-use searchable databases and reporting forms. She said improvements to the Web site are ongoing.

She also said she and her staff are open to citizen questions and input, and try to be responsive to questions about abuse or misuse in local governments.

While Anderson sometimes was accused of making the auditor’s position partisan, Otto said she doesn’t want that to happen with her.

“I have not been accused once yet of being partisan, and I’m going to keep it that way,” she said. “In my job, good accounting practices are not Democrat or Republican. Good, meaningful reporting on local governments doesn’t have to be partisan. It doesn’t have to be that way.”