Written by Gary Blackmer,

I don’t presume to fill Mark Funkhouser’s shoes, which I’m sure are much larger than my size 10s, but I’d like to share some of my observations as an auditor here in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. I intend to write about the challenges and strategies of performance auditing, to provoke debate, and help us all be better professionals. I’ll try to keep the tone light and my black humor lightened to the color of Portland’s winter sky.

My perspective reflects the work environments I’ve been auditing since 1985, which differ from yours. You may find the ideas and strategies in future columns compelling, but I would caution you not to attempt them yourself without considerable forethought and preparation (this fine print is included to satisfy ALGA’s team of lawyers).

My background is intertwined with the institution of elected auditors in the Portland area. I worked as a staff auditor to the elected Portland auditor for six years, campaigned and was elected the Multnomah County Auditor (the metropolitan county), and later returned as the elected Portland Auditor. We also have an elected regional government auditor (Metro) and neighboring Washington County has an elected auditor.

The City and County auditors were part of those governments’ charters, which were drafted in the American populist era around 1910. Oregon was engulfed in populism – the first state to directly elect its congressional representatives; created the initiative, referendum, and recall powers; and an early grantor of the vote to women to name a few. These were all accountability measures, though professionalism in government was only beginning with the introduction of features such as civil service.

Auditors were the elected Council clerk, which included other duties such as accounting. In the 1960s, with the invention of the computer and financial software, these offices began shedding various duties and concentrating on auditing. I read about the political battle waged by Multnomah County Auditor Jake O’Donnell to possess the new computer due to arrive. He lost the battle for the computer and about 60 of his accounting staff were transferred to the new Finance Office. He was left with a half-dozen employees, still called auditors, who had little purpose or direction. I joke that the Portland Auditor’s Office had computers in the 1930s, because I saw them in the budget. Computer I, II, and III were job classifications. Good math skills were a basic requirement back then, in order to verify the payments.

The elected auditors in Washington County and Metro arrived in the late 70s and 80s, based upon the performance auditing models of Portland and Multnomah County.

All these offices now have certification requirements – Certified Public Accountant or Certified Internal Auditor – for any candidates. The credential fences off the offices from political opportunists and ensures that a professional leader is selected. In addition, the forms of government in Portland and Multnomah County make it difficult to have an appointed auditor.

I never conceived of being an elected official because politics seemed to be the antithesis of an analyst. Jewel Lansing, prior Multnomah County Auditor and Portland Auditor, hired me in 1985, for my analytical skills and practical operational experience, I believe. I also recall Jerry Silva was on the interview panel because Dick Tracy promised him dinner and drinks if he came up to help out, though that may be just stereotyping. One condition Jewel placed on me before offering the position was that I seek a professional certification, because I needed better credentials as a basis to “tell Bureau Directors how to do their job.” I managed to become a Certified Internal Auditor, back in the old days when there were essay questions and only 20% of the candidates succeeded in getting certified. And I had to walk three miles through the snow to take it. I made that last one up to uphold the geezer tradition.

Five years later Jewel approached me about running for the County Auditor seat. I dismissed her notion immediately. But I did start looking at the work being done by the incumbent, who won the office because there was no certification requirement at the time and his father was the former Mayor of Portland. I knew I could do better than someone with no audit experience; there were no other opponents, so I ran and got elected (it was much more complicated but we’ll move on for now).

Performance auditing fits my abilities and interests like a glove. I get great satisfaction from practical problem-solving and serving the public. The variety of assignments means new challenges and a bird’s eye view of government operations. Police patrol scheduling, fire workload and performance, parking garage management, street paving operations, and financial condition reporting taught me a great deal while I was a staff auditor in Portland.

As the County Auditor, I could focus on the larger issues and develop a strategy in audit selection. I enjoyed the broad power to consider the quality of management in departments and time the audit schedule to have the most positive impact. I enjoyed the enthusiasm, curiosity, and creativity of the auditors. And I still enjoy the shock among students and citizens when I explain my job and they realize how interesting and challenging performance auditing can be.

I discovered performance auditing by accident, because my agency was being audited. I had been working in the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office planning and research unit. In the months we weren’t preparing the budget I was analyzing patrol deployment practices to see how we matched up with the workload. I had filled entire shelves with binders of charts and tables of data by hour of day, day of week, geographically, and about every other conceivable way. Imagine my excitement when an auditor showed up and began asking me how we tracked patrol deployment!

I realized that this auditor got to analyze the same questions I did, but in a wide variety of fields, not just law enforcement. That County auditor was Doug Norman who later joined the Portland audit staff and shared his office with me in my rookie years after I was hired.

Multnomah County had started conducting performance audits in the late seventies. This came about because Jewel Lansing volunteered to drive Lennis Knighton from the airport to his speaking engagement. She learned about performance auditing and made it a part of her campaign platform when she ran for the office. She got rid of the Jake O’Donnell staff and hired new auditors with a skill set that encompassed much more than accounting, and started issuing audits that brought attention, and change, to Multnomah County operations.

Jewel Lansing became very popular and ran for State Treasurer but was defeated. She later ran for City Auditor and introduced performance auditing there as well. I have not described the challenges she faced in these two large accomplishments or her other contributions to performance auditing, which is a story in itself. In the Multnomah County Auditor’s Library, we had the complete collection of Yellow Books, from the very first in 1972, which really should have been called the Yellow Pamphlet.

That was the year I graduated from college. Northern Illinois University has a very well-respected school of accounting. I am not boasting, because my degree is in philosophy. I liked philosophy because I saw it as analysis and problem-solving, though I later learned it had limited practical applications. I had been majoring in pre-optometry, heavy in math and science, but soon realized it wasn’t the career I really wanted, but I needed to graduate in four years in some major.

Looking for some direction, I took a vocational aptitude test and it said I should either be a computer programmer or a journalist. I had never used a computer in 1969 and I did write for the college newspaper, but hated producing stories about boring things. When I ran across the results of the aptitude test 25 years later I realized how close I had come to a combination of those two professions. I had found a way to use computers to tell important stories to the public. Besides philosophy, I had also done post-graduate work in Systems Science, which taught me a toolbox of analysis methods, including Revised Polish Notation on my Hewlett-Packard 25 programmable calculator.

Now, with the development of the performance auditor profession, I imagine more students are getting directed earlier to the field it took me 15 years to find. I have college friends who still shake their heads at the arc of my career. I had no plan, but it was still a natural progression. Even I am surprised at the sequence, because I remember a ride home from college, with my folks sitting in the front seat. My Dad was going on about some detail at work and I could not reconcile it with the massive demonstrations against the Vietnam War and the obvious moral bankruptcy of President Nixon. I remember thinking to myself, there is no way, no how, that I could ever do my Dad’s kind of work.

Though I also remember sometimes on a Saturday morning, he would take me to work with him and he would show me the machinery he worked with. He would let me type my name on the keyboard, which would produce a card with holes in it, just like the stacks of others he ran through an immense sorting machine that printed out lines on wide paper. He was the controller in a corporation, and by gosh, I fell a little farther from that tree.

And I still remember an old schoolhouse saying he taught me:

That’s the course of my professional life to its headwaters, with some of what I witnessed and learned about the field of auditing as it transformed from a clerk to an accountability professional.