What Is This Audit Everyone Is Talking About?

Scroll through the comments on any of the posts coming from MA Governor Maura Healey's official account and you'll find lots of irate comments talking about an audit. "What about our audit?" "Audit please!" "We voted for an audit!!!" It doesn't matter what the topic of the post is.

When I first heard people arguing about "the audit," I assumed it was one of those dry government accounting things that only policy bores lose sleep over. Then I saw all this outrage on the socials...and I thought, hmmm, there must be more to this. Understatement!

In November 2024, Massachusetts voters were asked a straightforward question: should the State Auditor have the authority to audit the state legislature? 72% said yes. Every single municipality in the state voted yes. It wasn't close, it wasn't ambiguous, and it wasn't partisan. It was the largest victory margin of any ballot question that election cycle.

That was about 18 months ago. The audit has not happened. The legislature has refused to comply, the Attorney General is defending the legislature in court, and the whole thing is now before the Supreme Judicial Court. The woman who pushed for the vote, State Auditor Diana DiZoglio, is suing her own party's leadership to enforce a law that the voters overwhelmingly approved.

Once you start pulling the thread, this story touches on sexual harassment, taxpayer-funded hush money, a convicted felon who set the precedent for blocking audits, a governor who promised transparency and then claimed the same exemptions she once criticized, and the fact that Massachusetts is the only state in America where all three branches of government are exempt from public records law.

Yes, this is a massive can of worms. So for my own understanding of the whole picture, let me try to walk through it from the beginning, because I think this one matters.

(This article is spread over two parts, as there is so much to cover.)

Diana DiZoglio is the Massachusetts State Auditor. She was elected in 2022 and took office in January 2023. She's a Democrat, which becomes important later, because this entire fight is a Democrat suing her own party's legislative leadership, with her own party's Attorney General defending the people she's suing.

Before becoming auditor, DiZoglio spent ten years in the Massachusetts Legislature, first in the House, then the Senate. She was, by most accounts, not a go-along-to-get-along type. She clashed with leadership, pushed procedural reforms that went nowhere, and was considered an outsider within her own party. One observer described her as "the most polarizing political figure in the Massachusetts Democratic Party." Another put it more simply: "Democrats either hate this woman or they love her to death." (I like the sound of her already to be honest!)

But there's a specific moment in her career that explains a lot about why she's doing what she's doing.

In 2011, while working as a legislative aide on Beacon Hill, DiZoglio experienced sexual harassment. She was subsequently fired. And she was made to sign a non-disclosure agreement (an NDA) that prohibited her from talking about what happened.

Fast forward seven years, in March 2018, she broke that NDA on the floor of the Massachusetts House during a debate on workplace harassment policies. She proposed an amendment to ban NDAs in all workplace complaints, not just sexual harassment, but any form of misconduct or discrimination. It was defeated 21 to 131. The House instead adopted a narrower amendment that only limited NDAs in sexual harassment cases.

During that same debate, Representative Angelo Scaccia, the House's longest-serving member at the time, stood up and directly accused Speaker Robert DeLeo of using NDAs "around 33 times," and asked publicly how much taxpayer money had been spent to silence those 33 people. Nobody answered.

So it is personal for her, which makes her dangerously effective. When DiZoglio ran for State Auditor in 2022, auditing the legislature was the centerpiece of her campaign. It wasn't a hidden agenda or a pivot. It was her entire pitch. She won a competitive Democratic primary against Chris Dempsey, a more establishment-backed candidate who had the endorsement of the outgoing auditor and the backing of former House Speaker DeLeo, who was spotted at a Dempsey fundraiser. DiZoglio had the unions (the Teachers Association, the Nurses Association, the AFL-CIO) and she won decisively, 54% to 46%. In deep-blue Massachusetts, winning the Democratic primary is effectively winning the job, and she did.

So the voters who elected her knew exactly what they were getting. And then, two years later, 72% of all voters confirmed it on the ballot.

This is where it gets interesting, because DiZoglio isn't asking to review how legislators vote or what policies they support. She's asking to see the financial receipts. How many taxpayer-funded NDAs and settlement agreements has the legislature paid out, and how much public money was used to keep people quiet? What's in the "balance forward" line item, those pots of money that roll over year to year with little documentation? Her office said it "could not determine how and to what extent" these funds are tracked. Who's getting vendor contracts, and are there no-bid deals or patronage? Does the legislature follow the same fair-hiring standards as other state agencies, or are there political appointments that wouldn't survive scrutiny?

She's also flagged that in 2020, the state spent $4.8 billion on contracting but only $23 million, just 0.5%, went to Black or Hispanic-owned businesses. And she wants to examine the practice of "dark committee votes," where important bills die in committee without any public record of who voted for or against them.

As DiZoglio has put it: "I have only asked for financial receipts and state contracts. There is nothing unconstitutional about every single person in this room, and all of our families in our communities, getting access to that information."

Speaker Ronald Mariano's response was blunt: he will "not comply with an audit," calling it "unconstitutional and wholly unnecessary." Senate President Karen Spilka took a similar position, arguing that the separation of powers clause means the chamber is "empowered to manage its own business and set its own rules." She pointed out that the Senate undergoes an annual audit by an independent certified public accounting firm.

DiZoglio's counter to that is simple: the legislature hires and pays for its own auditing firms. They're grading their own homework. (This sounds familiar: during the Irish bank crash (c. 2008), the major Irish banks were paying their own auditors, and that didn't end well.)

The core legal argument from legislative leadership is that an audit by an executive branch official (the State Auditor) violates the constitutional separation of powers. And on the surface, it sounds reasonable. You don't want one branch of government reaching into another and dictating how it operates. But when you look at the history, the argument starts to fall apart.

Massachusetts has not had an independent audit of its legislature since 1922. Over a hundred years.

But here's the thing. Before 1922, audits were routine. DiZoglio's office has documented over 113 audits going back to 1849. For more than a century, auditing the legislature was normal, unremarkable, constitutional. Nobody raised a separation of powers objection because there wasn't one to raise.

So what changed?

In the early 1990s, House Speaker Charles Flaherty blocked State Auditor Joe DeNucci, the longest-serving state auditor in Massachusetts history (he held the job for 24 years), from auditing the legislature. DeNucci insisted he had the authority and asked Attorney General Scott Harshbarger for a formal opinion. In April 1994, Assistant AG Peter Sacks issued a letter saying the question was "not free from doubt" as a matter of statutory interpretation, but (and this is important) stated there would be "no significant separation of powers objection to a statute clearly authorizing" the auditor to audit the legislature. Despite this, Flaherty refused to cooperate, and DeNucci didn't force the issue through the courts.

The separation of powers defense was born. And now here's the part that makes you want to put your head through a wall.

In March 1996, federal charges were announced against Speaker Flaherty for tax evasion. He resigned as Speaker on April 1, 1996, and pleaded guilty to a federal felony. Separately, he admitted to civil violations of state conflict of interest law for accepting free vacation housing from lobbyists on multiple occasions, in Martha's Vineyard and Newport, from people who had business before the legislature.

The person who established the modern precedent of blocking legislative audits was convicted of the exact kind of financial misconduct an audit might have uncovered. DiZoglio has cited this directly: "Auditing the Legislature was commonplace until the 1990s" when Flaherty blocked it, and Flaherty "later admitted to conflicts of interest and was convicted of felony tax evasion." She's called the legislature's arguments against audit authority "complete baloney, because it conflicts with history."

I have to say, the Flaherty detail is the one that really got me. You can have a good-faith debate about separation of powers in the abstract. But when the guy who invented the defense turned out to be the guy who needed the defense, the abstract argument loses a lot of its shine.

Here's where it gets even more tangled. Attorney General Andrea Campbell, also a Democrat, has chosen to represent the legislative leaders (Mariano and Spilka) rather than support DiZoglio in enforcing a voter-approved law. When DiZoglio filed suit with the Supreme Judicial Court in February 2026, Campbell's office asked the court to dismiss the case, arguing DiZoglio had bypassed the AG's office.

DiZoglio then tried to hire her own attorney, Shannon Liss-Riordan, to represent her independently. In early March, Justice Dalila Argaez Wendlandt denied that request. Another setback.

By late March, Campbell said on Boston Public Radio that she saw a "pathway forward" and urged "let's get it done," while her office simultaneously continued to defend the legislature in court. DiZoglio says Campbell won't return her calls. The public feud between the two continues.

The case has now been referred to the full Supreme Judicial Court. No ruling on the actual merits has been issued. The court hasn't even reached the question of whether the auditor has the constitutional right to audit the legislature. Everything so far has been procedural. Justice Wendlandt explicitly stated: "At this time, I am not reporting or deciding the merits of the State Auditor's dispute with the Legislature."

So we're 18 months past a 72% voter mandate, and the courts haven't even gotten to the question of whether the voters' decision is enforceable.

Governor Maura Healey's arc on this issue is its own story.

As Attorney General from 2015 to 2023, she said all the right things. In July 2015, she stated publicly: "No one should enjoy a categorical blanket exemption from our public records law." In March 2015, she vowed to "make sure the public records law is enforced aggressively." But in eight years as AG, there's no record of her taking any formal action to challenge the legislature's exemption or issuing any opinion on the auditor's authority.

As governor-elect in December 2022, she went further, telling reporters she would not claim the public records exemption as governor and would "support more transparency for Legislature, judiciary."

As governor? By February 2023, her office began refusing to release call logs, emails, and settlement agreements, citing the same 1997 court ruling she had criticized as AG. GBH ran a piece titled "Maura Healey's incredible vanishing transparency promise." Her official webpage now states that records held by the Governor's Office "are not subject to the Massachusetts public records law."

Before the November 2024 vote on Question 1, Healey refused to take a position, telling reporters she would "leave that to the voters." After the overwhelming 72-29 passage, she pivoted: "I supported it, I support it, yeah." But her support has remained entirely verbal, with no action and no pressure on the legislature.

DiZoglio says Healey hasn't returned her calls in over a year. Monthly meetings between the governor and auditor have stopped.

Why? I assume it's because Healey needs Speaker Mariano and Senate President Spilka to pass her agenda on housing, healthcare, climate, and economic development. One analysis described the audit as "fraught with political peril for Healey." She cannot afford open conflict with the legislature without compromising her own priorities.

As AG she said "no one should enjoy a blanket exemption." As a candidate she promised she wouldn't claim the exemption. As governor she claims the exemption. As governor she won't return the auditor's calls. It's a case study in how the system absorbs people. Or that election promises are pretty worthless.

One of the most unusual aspects of this fight is who's lined up together. The audit has support from a coalition that, on any other issue, would never be in the same room.

From the left: Our Revolution Massachusetts and Act on Mass, a progressive group focused on legislative transparency. From the right: the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, a conservative fiscal oversight organization. The two issued a joint statement "firmly agreeing on bringing more transparency and accountability to the broken legislative process." When was the last time you saw progressives and fiscal conservatives agreeing on anything?

The coalition has scored some small wins. They successfully pressured the legislature into making committee "no" votes available online, which is a real if modest transparency improvement. They're running accountability campaigns targeting legislators who opposed the audit, and they're pushing a trio of new 2026 ballot questions.

And the polling is devastating for legislative leaders. A March 2026 survey found that 83% of respondents believe the legislature should drop its opposition to the audit, and 82% believe legislators should allow audits. The legislature is defying a position that has over 80% public support, heading into an election year.

In March 2026, the Society of Professional Journalists gave Massachusetts its annual "Black Hole Award," an honor reserved for the government entity that best demonstrates "a troubling lack of transparency and disregard for the public's right to know."

Massachusetts earned it because all three branches of state government (the governor's office, the legislature, and the judiciary) are largely exempt from public records requirements. It is the only state in America where that's the case. Michigan is the closest comparison, but even Michigan only exempts individual legislators' records, not the institution itself.

The state also earned a D+ (67 out of 100) from the Center for Public Integrity's State Integrity Investigation, though that was back in 2015, and things haven't exactly improved since.

As of April 2026, the case is before the full Supreme Judicial Court. No ruling on the merits. No audit. No documents produced. The Senate has asked the SJC for advisory opinions on whether the stipend reform ballot initiative (a separate but connected fight I wrote about in my last post) is constitutional too.

DiZoglio is running for reelection, unopposed. No Democratic primary challenger, no Republican opponent. The audit fight is her reelection platform. Meanwhile, Speaker Mariano and Senate President Spilka don't appear to face primary challengers running specifically on the audit issue, despite being the primary targets of 80%+ public disapproval on this question.

There's a Republican gubernatorial candidate, Mike Minogue, who has made audit enforcement central to his campaign, and in a twist that captures how strange this whole situation is, he offered to personally fund outside lawyers for DiZoglio, a Democrat, to sue her own party's leadership. A Republican donor funding a Democratic auditor's lawsuit against Democratic leaders. Massachusetts in 2026.

This post is already long enough, and I haven't even gotten to some of the most important parts of this story: the nearly $48 million in taxpayer-funded settlements DiZoglio has already uncovered across executive agencies (with hundreds of NDAs still in use after they were supposedly banned), and the national pattern of state legislatures across the country defying voter-approved ballot measures. And somehow, given everything I've just described, this story has received almost zero national media attention.

That's all coming in Part 2.

— Emma

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