The State Auditor’s primary job is to ferret out waste, fraud and abuse in government and to insure taxpayer funds are spent wisely, legally and efficiently.  These actions violate everything the Auditor’s office stands for.

I am shocked at both the magnitude of these expenses and their efforts to conceal and justify this lavish spending.  Excessive travel, expensive hotels and fancy dinners are not essential government services.

The maximum reimbursement for any dinner meal is $20.00.  Otto and her Deputy created a convoluted spreadsheet filled with errors to attempt to justify being reimbursed for excessive meal costs.  Also, according to the records provided by the Auditor’s office, they were reimbursed over the maximum allowed several times on their trips.  At each of these conferences, food was included with the conference fee and meals were served.  State law makes the attendee ineligible for separate meal reimbursement.

During this same time, both the executive branch under Governor Pawlenty and the legislative branch under the DFL Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher, issued an out-of-state travel ban.  As an independent constitutional office, Otto was not legally bound by these travel bans.  Instead, she ignored the austerity measures the rest of the state was imposing all around her and arrogantly took advantage of out-of-state travel at a time when the state was, and still is, broke.

Otto’s response was that she was “required” to attend these conferences and stay in these hotels.  That is patently false.  There is no requirement to attend conferences by any of the pension fund boards and in fact, most trustees do not attend many, if any, conferences.  And they certainly do not take their staff members to these conferences which only serves to double the costs.  I urge the public to contact PERA (Public Employees Retirement Association) to confirm she is lying about being required to attend conferences.

It’s an insult to the intelligence of Minnesotans to think she is “required” to attend numerous out-of-state conferences during a public employee travel ban, consistently stay at $400 per night hotels and is “required” to eat lobster dinners to do her job.

When the top two people in charge of investigating waste, fraud and abuse are defrauding and abusing the system themselves, we have a real problem.

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