Vernon Ehlers: “I rise to make two points. First of all, a good reason for doing the audit is that we do not know what we will find.…”

“I rise to make two points. First of all, a good reason for doing the audit is that we do not know what we will find. When we did this in Michigan 2 years ago after a large number of years of Democratic rule, we discovered a major scandal in the House fiscal agency. As a result of that discovery, we currently have three former staff members serving prison time, four more on probation, three still in the courts. That is an example of the type of thing you may find, and it is not a result of the Members' misbehavior but of staff misbehavior. My second point, all of the discussion has been about fiscal aspects, but the operational aspects of the audit are equally, if not more, important, in particular the computer activities which I hope to audit. Just a few weeks ago a Member came to me that spent $22,000 for a file server last year. It is now useless. I urge that we go ahead with both the fiscal and operational audit and do it well.”