What Is This Audit Everyone Is Talking About? PART 2

On May 28, the Massachusetts Senate voted 33 to 6 to hand over financial records to Auditor Diana DiZoglio. After a year and a half of refusing to comply with a voter-approved law, after lawsuits, court orders, and 72% of voters telling them to open their books, the Senate finally agreed to turn over some documents.

It sounds like something of a victory. But DiZoglio wasn't celebrating and a poke around in the detail reveals why. The resolution the Senate passed states that the Senate "does not concede" that an audit is constitutional. It reserves the right to refuse any future requests. The documents it's handing over are limited to four specific categories the Supreme Judicial Court outlined, covering just four fiscal years. And Senator Cindy Friedman made a point of telling reporters this was being done voluntarily, not because a court made them, which is a bit like saying you voluntarily paid the speeding fine after the judge told you to. To me, it reads like a carefully hedged concession.

The House, meanwhile, isn't even doing that. Speaker Mariano sent a letter to representatives the same day saying a resolution "would not be the appropriate method" and that the House is instead working on "comprehensive transparency legislation." No timeline, no specifics, just the promise of a future bill that would need the Senate to agree to it too.

DiZoglio's response was blunt: she called Senate leaders "detached from reality" and pointed out what this actually is: "This is not a public records request, it's an audit." Handing over some budget documents that are already semi-public is not the same as cooperating with an independent audit of how taxpayer money has been spent, who was paid off, and why, which is what the public voted on.

But to understand why handing over some budget documents is being treated as a breakthrough, and why DiZoglio isn't celebrating, you need the backstory that Part 1 didn't cover. If you haven't read Part 1, start there. What follows is everything else: the $48 million in settlements, the NDAs that were supposed to be banned, the harassment nobody talks about, the national pattern, and the question of why none of this is front-page news outside Massachusetts.

While the legislature blocks DiZoglio from examining its books, she's been auditing what she can reach, the executive branch agencies.

And what she's found is interesting.

In January 2025, her office published the results of an audit covering 75 executive branch agencies. They found 2,029 employee settlements totaling nearly $41 million. At least 159 of those settlements included non-disclosure or confidentiality clauses. And 52 of those confidentiality agreements were signed after 2018, the year Massachusetts supposedly banned NDAs following the #MeToo reforms. Her office also found no documented evidence that Governor Baker ever formally created the NDA ban policy he announced, and that the majority of agencies had no written policies governing when or how confidentiality clauses should be used.

A year later, in January 2026, a second audit covering 21 additional agencies (universities, quasi-state agencies, constitutional offices) found at least 263 more agreements totaling $6.8 million. One stood out: a $1.375 million Massport settlement using taxpayer money to conceal allegations of gender discrimination, disability discrimination, unequal pay, and false damaging statements. 95% of the agencies in this second round had no written policies on confidentiality clauses.

Add it up and you get nearly $48 million in settlements, hundreds of NDAs, and a pattern of agencies using public money to buy silence from employees, in some cases years after the practice was supposed to have stopped.

And these numbers only cover the agencies DiZoglio can audit. The legislature itself, the body that is fighting hardest against transparency, has refused to hand over a single document.

In October 2017, Boston Globe reporter Yvonne Abraham published an investigation based on interviews with a dozen women who worked in and around the State House over two decades. They described being propositioned by lawmakers, inappropriately touched, groped, chased, and pressured for sex. House lawmakers were viewing pornography on cellphones in the chamber. Every single woman spoke on condition of anonymity, because they feared career retaliation. Speaker DeLeo said he was "deeply troubled."

A few months later came the Stan Rosenberg scandal. Rosenberg was the Senate President, from Western Massachusetts. Four men accused his estranged husband, Bryon Hefner, of sexual harassment and assault, including leveraging proximity to Rosenberg for sexual favors. Hefner was indicted, pleaded guilty to three charges, and received probation. An ethics probe found Rosenberg had given Hefner access to his Senate email account. Rosenberg resigned from the Senate in May 2018.

It was in the middle of all this, in March 2018, that DiZoglio broke her own NDA on the House floor and proposed banning NDAs in all workplace complaint situations. Her amendment was soundly defeated. During that same debate, Rep. Angelo Scaccia publicly accused DeLeo of using NDAs to silence staff. DeLeo's own written response confirmed the number: approximately 33 people.

The House did create a reform mechanism after that debate: an Equal Employment Opportunity Officer position to handle harassment complaints. John McLafferty was appointed in June 2019. He left after less than two years. The position has been vacant since 2020. Over five years with no one in the role. The one mechanism the House created to handle harassment complaints has basically been empty for most of the time it's existed.

Meanwhile, legislative staff have been trying to unionize. In 2022, approximately 200 staff members signed union cards, citing systemic racism, unequal pay, and a culture that allows discrimination and harassment to persist. Legislation was filed in January 2023 to allow legislative staff the right to unionize. The committee extended its review into summer 2024 rather than issuing a decision. Stalling as strategy.

When I first started looking into the audit story, I assumed it was a local Massachusetts problem. It isn't. State legislatures across the country have been defying, gutting, and overriding voter-approved ballot measures for years, and the pattern is accelerating. The Ballot Initiative Strategy Center tracked 33 bills targeting ballot measures in 2017. By mid-2026, they were monitoring over 180 across the country.

The examples are striking, and each one uses a slightly different playbook.

In South Dakota in 2016, voters approved Initiative 22, creating an ethics commission, limiting lobbyist gifts, and establishing "democracy vouchers." Within three months, the Republican legislature repealed the entire law, using an emergency clause to prevent citizens from launching a referendum to save it. Voters demanded oversight. The legislature said no and made sure voters couldn't ask again.

In Missouri in 2020, voters approved Medicaid expansion. The Republican-led legislature refused to fund it. Governor Mike Parson dropped implementation. But the Missouri Supreme Court stepped in and overturned the legislature's position, forcing compliance. This one matters for Massachusetts because it shows courts can make legislatures obey voter mandates. The Massachusetts SJC has pushed the process forward, but hasn't ruled on whether the legislature must actually comply.

In Florida in 2018, nearly 65% of voters approved Amendment 4, restoring voting rights to felons who had completed their sentences. Governor DeSantis signed a bill requiring full payment of all fines, fees, and restitution first, effectively gutting the initiative by making it impossible for most people affected. Florida didn't repeal the amendment. It technically implemented it while adding conditions that made it meaningless. A different kind of defiance.

And then there's Mississippi, which is the most extreme version of all. In 2021, the state's Supreme Court struck down the entire ballot initiative process because it required signature gathering in five congressional districts, but the state only had four since the 2000 census. The legislature has kept the process frozen since. In 2026, a bill to restore it was tabled. Mississippi voters literally cannot put anything on the ballot anymore. The state didn't defy one ballot measure. It eliminated the ability of voters to propose them at all.

Ohio is the rare success story. In 2023, the legislature tried to raise the ballot initiative passage threshold from 50% to 60%, explicitly timed to prevent an upcoming measure on abortion rights. Ohio voters recognized what was happening, overwhelmingly rejected the attempt, and then approved abortion rights in November with a 13-point margin.

What makes Massachusetts unique in this pattern is that it doesn't fit the usual partisan narrative. Most of these examples involve one party blocking the other party's voters. In Massachusetts, it's a one-party state blocking its own voters. Democrats hold supermajorities in both chambers. Democratic voters approved this. Democratic leadership is blocking it. The person trying to enforce it is a Democrat. The person defending the blockers is a Democrat. There's no easy tribal framing, which is part of why the national media hasn't picked it up.

And Massachusetts has form here. Before the current audit standoff, the legislature defunded a voter-approved Clean Elections law starting in 1998 and formally repealed it in 2003. They also suspended a voter-approved income tax rollback from 2000, replacing it with a "revenue trigger" that delayed implementation indefinitely.

The national pattern is one thing. But you don't even have to leave New England to see how unusual Massachusetts is. Take the specific things DiZoglio wants to audit, spending records, vendor contracts, settlement agreements, committee votes, and look at what the neighboring states already make available.

Connecticut has had a Freedom of Information Act since 1975 that covers the legislature. It's enforced by an independent Freedom of Information Commission with nine members, and in 2023 the legislature raised the maximum fine for violations from $1,000 to $10,000. Just this month, the General Assembly passed a bill requiring additional documentation and reporting on all legislatively directed earmarks. Connecticut's system isn't perfect, and there's actually a live legal dispute right now over whether some "legitimate legislative activities" records are exempt under the speech and debate clause. But the principle that the legislature is subject to public records law is established and enforced.

Rhode Island has its Access to Public Records Act, and the Attorney General's open government team investigates complaints against public bodies, including the legislature, for alleged violations. Rhode Island has its own transparency problems (over 30 exemptions, reform bills have died in committee three years in a row, and the law hasn't been meaningfully updated since 2012), but the legislature is at least subject to the framework. When agencies block records, there's a mechanism for challenging them.

New Hampshire arguably has the strongest setup in the region. RSA 14:31 requires all state departments, boards, institutions, commissions, and agencies to furnish any information, including confidential information, to the Office of Legislative Budget Assistant. The audit division conducts financial and performance audits of state agencies. The state runs a TransparentNH portal where the public can access budget, expenditure, and revenue information online. New Hampshire's legislature isn't hiding spending records. It's publishing them on a website.

Vermont has a Public Records Act that covers government broadly, a State Auditor who conducts financial and performance audits, and a SPOTLIGHT financial transparency website where citizens can look up contracts, grants, expenditures, and audit reports. Committee meetings and votes are accessible through the legislature's website.

OK, none of these states is a transparency paradise. But each of them operates on the basic principle that the legislature is subject to some form of public records or audit oversight. What DiZoglio is asking for, the ability to see spending records and vendor contracts, is something the neighboring states already provide to varying degrees.

The legislature's argument that an audit would be "unconstitutional" sounds a lot less convincing when you can drive over the MA state line.

While the legal fight plays out at the SJC, something quieter has been happening at the local level.

In early 2026, the town of Reading became the first municipality in Massachusetts to send a formal letter to Speaker Mariano and Senate President Spilka supporting the audit. After Reading, the eastern Massachusetts towns of Dighton and Somerset voted to send similar letters. Then Agawam's city council passed a resolution in support.

In April, Chesterfield became the first town in western Massachusetts to join them. The three-member Select Board wrote to Mariano and Spilka that Massachusetts is "among the least transparent states in the nation" and that "the legislature remains the only state entity that does not permit oversight by the State Auditor's Office." The letter noted that "while legislative leaders have claimed that internal audits by a privately procured vendor are sufficient, the voters of Massachusetts have clearly expressed their desire for an independent review."

Matt Barron, the Chesterfield resident who brought the idea forward, put it plainly: "People are very upset that this law we voted for, 72% of the state, is not being implemented. The will of the people is being ignored."

Select Board chair Roger Fuller was even more straightforward: "If the government can be audited, it can prevent waste. So in my mind, if I'm not against it, I'm willing to sign the letter."

Wilmington announced it would vote at its next meeting. In Chicopee, city council Vice President Sam Shumsky is sponsoring an audit support resolution, with council President Frank LaFlamme co-sponsoring. Revere's city council, interestingly, shot down the idea, despite 62% of Revere residents voting in favor of Question 1. Not every municipality is on board.

It's a modest movement so far. A handful of towns sending letters to legislative leaders who have shown no sign of caring what voters think. But there's something genuinely interesting about it: when voters feel their ballot measure is being ignored, some of them are going back to the most local form of democracy they have and trying again. Select boards and city councils passing resolutions isn't going to change Mariano's mind. But it does make it harder for anyone to pretend the public has moved on.

This is the question I keep coming back to. When you lay it all out in sequence, it reads like a major scandal. A legislature unaudited for over 100 years. A Speaker in the 1990s who blocked the audit and was later convicted of tax evasion. Decades of documented sexual harassment where victims were silenced with taxpayer-funded NDAs. Nearly $48 million in settlements found across the agencies that can be audited. A harassment oversight position created as a reform and then left vacant for five years. 72% of voters demanding transparency. The legislature refusing. The governor who promised transparency now claiming the same exemptions she once criticized. The attorney general who spent months defending the people defying the voters before the Supreme Judicial Court forced her hand. And the only state in America where all three branches of government are exempt from public records law.

In any other context, a corporation, a charity, a university, this would be front-page national news. A board refusing to be audited after a shareholder vote of 72%? Secret settlements? An oversight officer position left empty for years? To any sensible person, that's a scandal.

But it hasn't been treated as one, and here are my speculations as to why:

There's no single explosive revelation. Scandals in media usually need a moment: a leaked document, a caught-on-camera incident, a specific dollar figure attached to a specific person. This story is structural. It's about a system designed to prevent the revelation from ever happening. The scandal is the absence of information, which is much harder to turn into a headline than a specific piece of information.

It doesn't fit a partisan narrative. Most national political media is organized around a left-right axis. This story is Democrats blocking Democrats in a deep-blue state. Conservative outlets have picked it up because they can frame it as "look what Democrats do," but the progressive outlets that would normally champion transparency and accountability have ignored it because the villains are on their team. I searched The Bulwark, one of the most prominent center-left publications in the country, a site that covers democratic accountability and institutional power as its bread and butter. I couldn't find an article about the Massachusetts audit, DiZoglio, or the legislature's refusal to comply with a 72% voter mandate.

The Massachusetts political media ecosystem is small and dependent. The State House press corps has to maintain relationships with the Speaker and Senate President to do their daily jobs. The Globe and WBUR have covered it well, but investigative journalism is expensive and the outlets are small.

And the public doesn't fully understand what's being hidden. That's the whole point of the system. You can't be outraged about what you don't know exists. Voters are angry in the abstract (80%+ support for the audit), but they can't point to a specific misuse of funds because the records are sealed. The outrage stays diffuse rather than focused.

I'm from Ireland, so I know that European governments aren't perfect. But the contrast with Massachusetts is so stark that it's worth spelling out.

In Sweden, the principle of public access to government documents has been law since 1766. That's 260 years. All documents received, dispatched, or created by public authorities are public by default. The Swedish National Audit Office operates under the Riksdag (parliament) and its independence is enshrined in the constitution. The Auditor General is appointed for a seven-year non-renewable term and independently decides what to audit. No instructions from government or parliament. No ballot questions needed. No lawsuits.

France's Cour des Comptes has been auditing government spending since 1807, with roots going back to 1256. It's independent from both the government and parliament, with seven chambers and over 800 employees. It can audit the legislature. Procurement contracts above €90,000 must be publicly published.

The UK went through its own crisis of legislative secrecy. In 2009, the MPs' expenses scandal revealed widespread misuse of public funds by Members of Parliament. Duck houses, moat cleaning, phantom mortgages. It was humiliating. But the response was to create more oversight, not less. Parliament created the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, ending MPs' self-regulation of pay and expenses. The National Audit Office audits around 400 government bodies annually. The UK Parliament is now actively investigating the use of NDAs in discrimination cases, directly parallel to what DiZoglio is trying to examine.

What DiZoglio is asking for, basic access to spending records, vendor contracts, and settlement agreements, is standard practice across most European democracies. Several countries have had these frameworks for decades or centuries. Massachusetts's blanket exemption of all three branches from public records law isn't just an outlier within the US. It's an outlier globally.

A lot happened in May 2026 to force the concession I described at the top of this piece.

On May 6, the Supreme Judicial Court heard oral arguments in DiZoglio v. Mariano and Spilka. The House Republican caucus filed a brief supporting DiZoglio, making the bipartisan nature of this fight official and on the record. Inside the courtroom, Justices Scott Kafker and Dalila Argaez Wendlandt repeatedly pressed the AG's side on how long the dispute had dragged on without any progress, with Kafker specifically raising the strong public interest in having the constitutional questions resolved. Justice Gabrielle Wolohojian suggested the court might need to issue a "fish or cut bait" order, setting a deadline for Campbell to decide whether she would represent DiZoglio or step aside.

The next day, that's exactly what the SJC did. On May 7, the court ordered AG Campbell to decide within 30 days, by June 6, whether her office would represent DiZoglio in pursuing the audit or authorize DiZoglio to hire outside counsel. No more stalling.

Five days later, Campbell made her choice. On May 12, the AG's office announced it was authorizing DiZoglio to proceed with outside counsel and initiating the appointment of labor attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan as a Special Assistant Attorney General. The AG's office will separately appoint its own SAAG to represent the legislature. But the authorization came with conditions: the SJC narrowed the scope to four specific areas for fiscal years 2021 through 2024 (official budgets, copies of official audits, balance forward line item transactions, and monetary settlements with employees or members), and DiZoglio must dismiss her current complaint and refile one consistent with these parameters.

Then, on May 28, the Senate made its move. The 33-6 vote to turn over documents, covered in the resolution's carefully hedged language, was a direct response to the SJC's order. Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr, a Republican, voted against the resolution, not because he opposes transparency but because he thinks it doesn't go far enough. He pointed out that the Senate's own independent audit is only seven pages long, and the most recent one available is from fiscal 2023. "You can understand why folks might want a little bit more," he said.

All five Republican senators voted no for the same reason. So did one Democrat, Mark Montigny. The resolution was unveiled at 1:48 in the afternoon, debated by 2:30, and fewer than half of senators were in the chamber when the discussion started. More arrived once voting began. That's how seriously the Senate treated this question that 72% of voters said yes to.

And the House? The House isn't doing any of it. Mariano's letter to representatives promised "comprehensive transparency legislation" at some unspecified future date, partly motivated by an advancing ballot question that would apply public records law to the legislature. The implication is clear: the House would rather write its own transparency rules than submit to an external audit. Which is, of course, exactly the problem.

I don't know how this ends. DiZoglio has signaled she's interested in seeking additional records beyond the four categories, and the Senate has preemptively reserved the right to refuse. The House hasn't agreed to hand over anything. The SJC has pushed the process forward but hasn't ruled on whether the legislature must actually comply with the audit as written into law. And at the Democratic convention in Worcester, DiZoglio took the stage singing "Where Is My Audit," told delegates that Beacon Hill is sick with "the disease of addiction to power and control," and received an overwhelming voice vote endorsement. Last year she told party leaders the "D" next to their names stood for "dictator, not Democrat." She hasn't gotten any quieter since.

Massachusetts in 2026 is fighting over whether the public has a right to see the receipts. In most of the democratic world, that question was answered centuries ago.

— Emma Quigley

Update: The story that keeps on giving. Days after I finished writing this piece, the story escalated dramatically. On June 3, the Massachusetts House voted 125-28 to pass a bill that would narrow the scope of the voter-approved audit and strip the courts of the ability to resolve disputes between the auditor and the legislature. The committee got 34 minutes to review the bill. There was no public hearing. DiZoglio called it "lighting the dumpster on fire." She has since called for Speaker Mariano to resign. I'm covering the House's counter-move, and what it means that the legislature's response to losing in court was to try to change the law, in Part 3.

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