Mark Funkhouser is President, Funkhouser & Associates. He is one of the founders of the International Center for Performance Auditing (ICPA) and previously spent 18 years with the Office of the City Auditor of Kansas and 10 years with the Tennessee Division of State Audit. He's been the Mayor of Kansas City, had spells in academia and publishing and has written a book on performance auditing.
In this episode, we discuss:
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Conor:
Today, we've got a special guest with a unique background. He's been involved for years in all things performance audit related, including 18 years with the office of the City Auditor of Kansas and 10 years with the Tennessee Division of State Audit. He's had spells in academia, publishing about good governance, and developing training for performance auditors. He's also served as the Mayor of Kansas City during the Great Recession. Somewhere in that time, he also found time to complete a study of performance auditing in various countries around the world and wrote a book on the topic. Mark Funkhouser, welcome to The Performance Audit Report.
Mark:
Thank you. Happy to be here.
Conor:
So, Mark, I'm sure I missed some key parts of your background in that intro. Can you talk us through some of those segments of your career and why performance auditing has been a constant in your work.
Mark:
In my college years, I discovered that government really makes a difference in people's lives. That if I really want to have a better community for myself and other people, government is critical. And so I started paying attention to how government works. I got a degree in political science. I became a social worker, got a MSW, and stumbled into performance auditing by complete accident. A friend of mine worked for the Tennessee State Auditor and said they were creating a program evaluation unit and they needed somebody who knew something about social science. And that was me, and I interviewed and got the job. And what I discovered was the critical role that auditing and performance auditing could have in good government. Make government more competent, more efficient, effective, equitable. And I had been a program evaluator. Program evaluators do research and it's wonderful, and they tell you more research is needed. Performance auditing, you actually got to issue reports, make recommendations and people had to pay attention to those recommendations. You had subpoena power, in the Tennessee State Auditor's Office and the City Auditor in Kansas City, you compelled testimony, you compelled delivery of documents. You could go anywhere, interview anybody in the government and they had to answer your questions. I mean, what's not to like? When I found this, I was like, this is wasted on the accountants. This is good stuff. I wanna do this.
Conor:
Terrific. One of the interesting aspects I think to us and certainly to our listers potentially is the fact that you had this great portion of your career immersed in the performance auditing world, but also as an elected political representative. Be really interested to get your views on any interactions between those two domains or areas and or the differences.
Mark:
Well, of course the differences are that the elected official, mayor in a big city like Kansas City, you're dealing with a dozen issues every day, or more. And you don't get to pick a topic, and study it, as you would in performance auditing. You have to raise money, you have to call people up and ask 'em for money, and, all that sort of thing. You have to deal with a wide variety of issues, but the fundamental reason and purpose is the same. And most of my, learning that I achieved as an auditor, stood me in very good stead in the mayor's office. I mean, probably the most significant reason that I decided to run for mayor, is that, I believed that the country and my city were on a path of fiscal disaster. And so righting the ship financially, getting it ready to weather a storm, was my principal motivation for running. I ran, announced in November of 2006, got elected in 2007. And the great recession that I thought would happen, did in fact happen in 2008. And so I was there and ready to go, and had a much different perspective on how the city should manage the recession than your normal elected official.
Conor:
One of the frustrations we frequently hear from performance auditors is that they spend all this time and do this great work and do in depth evaluations and they have a report and they make recommendations for change. The recommendations don't always get acted on, for one reason or another. Whether that's because maybe the elected officials or the decision makers haven't fully understood, the results of the analysis. Do you see there's an education role for performance auditors in helping elected officials and key decision makers bring forward changes to improve public service?
Mark:
You're hitting a topic that is of deep interest to me, but the person that needs to be educated is not the elected official. It's the auditor. The elected officials, you're not gonna educate them. You're not gonna change the incentives that they have for behavior and so forth. But you have to do your audit work in a way that is more compelling. You have to be relevant to the issues that are top of mind to their constituents and to them. I have written and talked about the intersection of politics and auditing many, many times over the last two or three decades. And I've seen progress, on the part of auditors. I think they're beginning to understand, a little better, what they need to do. But when I talk to, auditors, often they say, well, our work isn't political. We're not political. Well, your choices are political or irrelevant. Would you like to be irrelevant? And there's a way to do this that is straight-up and ethical and honest and fair and meets audit responsibility. I've a quote from Caroline Gardner, the head of Audit Scotland, about this issue in my book, and then in an article that I wrote. And basically she says that if the parliament isn't talking about our work, we're not auditing the right things and we're not doing the right stuff. She said, we play our role straight backed. We're not political advocates, but we have to be hitting issues that they care about. , I think that's absolutely true. I've had, you know, auditors and other professionals in government disparage politics and I tell 'em politics is sacred. That's how a self-governing people governs itself, and that's like saying, I like automobiles, but no gasoline please, or no, no energy to move the car. I guess it's electric energy now, but you have to have both. What can the auditors do? Well, they can one pick the right targets, the right topics. The second thing they can do is write in clear language. No passive voice, straight, and short, instead of a 75 or 85 or 120 page audit report. If you can't say it in 15 pages, there's something wrong with what you're doing. Visualization, graphics, that are clear and compelling. An elected official may not have time to read your report, but he or she can look at a graph. And if the graph is a good one or the visual is a good one, they're gonna get the message. But also the other folks in the arena, are going to get it. And another thing that I tell auditors in this, conversation is you need information, ideas, and allies. So you need information obviously about the program that you're, auditing, but you need a broad base of information about the context in which the program operates. You need to have ideas and the way to get ideas, obviously you're gonna talk to, subject matter experts and so forth, but I've long been an advocate for looking, and engaging the, global performance audit community. Particularly here in America, I don't think that most auditors realize that there are people all over the world, who are doing what you're doing. And some of them have some pretty good ideas and some of them have audited the same topic that you're auditing. And allies you need, particularly in civil society. The, Audit and Accountability Foundation in Canada is just a fountain, of good stuff. And they did a webinar recently on the engagement of civil society, in the audit work. And that is absolutely paramount. You need other people in the public arena who care about what you just wrote about.
Yusuf:
Switching gears just a little bit, based on your many, many years of performance audit experience and your continued involvement now, what do you see as things that are newer or delivery approaches that are newer within performance audit, that gets you excited.
Mark:
The fact that auditors are now squarely addressing issues of equity is incredibly important to me. I have long argued that they should. Citizens entrust government agencies with money and power, and the auditors have been focused on the money, but not the power. My police department in Kansas City spends two, 300 million a year. I care about that. They also have the capacity to shoot people dead. I care about that too. And so having auditors now finally, and GAO finally, tiptoeing into the equity arena is incredibly important, for legitimacy, for trust. You need to have a broad scope of audit work that looks at equity as well as efficiency and effectiveness. In terms of delivery, the things that are the most exciting and interesting to me right now. One, the much broader engagement of citizens in the actual audit process, you will have auditors who post on their website, put on Twitter, put on Facebook. We are about to audit the citizen complaint process in our police department. Please let us know if you've had experience in that. That kind of thing is incredibly important. And the engagement of users. One of the audits that, I've looked at that is interesting to me, in this respect is, the audit that the Auditor-General of Western Australia did on Indigenous children's ear health. And, the issue or the question was that Indigenous children were having like 5, 6, 7 times the level of infections and so forth in their ears that the white children were having. And this is real detrimental in terms of their brain development, their education and all that kind of thing. Why is this? Why is this happening? Well, it may sound obvious, but it's revolutionary. The auditors went and talked to folks in the Indigenous community and began to understand why certain communication methods weren't working and certain outreach methods weren't working. And the same kinds of things need to be done in lots of audit work. What is now in government called the user experience is incredibly important. So looking at issues like equity, engaging the broader citizen rate in the audit work and looking specifically at how to engage the users, or the people who are impacted by the particular topic that you are auditing, and looking broadly at, what are the issues? Uh, I talked about relevance earlier. What are the issues that are top of mind in your jurisdiction right now to your, citizens? in Kansas city I surveyed citizens every year. A professional survey, regarding what their level of satisfaction was with various services, what they rated as the importance of services. And then for some of my audits, I used the results to target audit work.
Yusuf:
You obviously were involved in, a range of local government audits, before getting into the mayor position. Have you seen any shifts on that front?
Mark:
Yes. Some of the most innovative work, at least in the United States is being done by city auditors and the growth in local government auditing in the United States and performance auditing has been phenomenal. In my dissertation back in 2000, there's a graph in the, dissertation that shows the spread of performance auditing among American cities. And it's an upward sloping line of about 45 degrees. And it got to about half the big cities in the country. In 1989, we had the first meeting of the Association of Local Government Auditors in the United States, uh, the founding meeting. And there were about 80 of us that showed up. And they were mostly white guys. If you go to the most recent meeting of the Association of Local Government Auditors here, uh, it'll be way over 400 folks. It will be a young and diverse crowd, a lot of women, a lot of people of color. So that's incredibly encouraging, and the work that they're doing, there's lots of audits. So there's something called the Knighton Award, named for Lennis Knighton who was, essentially the theoretical founder of performance auditing in the United States. So they give a Knighton Award every year to the best audit in, um, you know, large audit, medium size shop, smaller shop. And those are incredibly good. A couple of years ago, the Knighton Award went to, um, King County Audit Office, which is where Seattle is, for a really powerful audit that they did having to do with overtime of Sheriff's deputies. And what they showed was that when the deputies worked a significant amount of overtime, they were involved in more accidents. They had more citizen complaints against them. And so they did very sophisticated regression analysis and so forth to show this strong correlation, between those kinds of things. That was a powerful audit. And uh, one of the things, of course, you won't be surprised. I always follow up to find out what the impact was and that had, a significant impact.
Conor:
So let's talk about impact for a little bit, how do performance audit professionals, how can we get more impact or get our message across better? What are some of the strategies that you have seen work really well?
Mark:
When I wrote my book that you mentioned, I surveyed auditors, in the United States, and a lot of them didn't want to do things like issue a press release about the audit. Well, good Lord. You know, a tree falls in a forest and no-one's there to hear it. Well, gee, so, being clear that you want people to hear what you said. Using social media, using videos, to get the word out, I mentioned civil society, letting folks in the civil society community who care about whatever it is that you just audited, letting them know this audit report is out. It's got valuable information. There's gonna be a public hearing on the audit on Tuesday at two o'clock in the afternoon and room 24 of city hall. I mean, you have to, and you're gonna be accused of being political. I tell auditors all the time, don't let other people define for you what your role is. You used taxpayer resources in some cases, tens of thousands of dollars to produce something of value to taxpayers. You have a responsibility to tell the world about it. No matter who tells you, you shouldn't
Conor:
Wanted to touch for a little bit on the role of the media in civil society and the fact that, , they can be used as a force for good, as you've just described spreading the message about performance audit or a risk in society and so forth. But there are also perhaps some pitfalls come with that engagement with the media. We'll be really interested to get your views on that relationship.
Mark:
Yes, it's a jungle out there. You know, it's, it's not, it's not easy. And, and I don't know that I, I, I think you have to be engaged. You have to answer questions. You have to be proactive and you have to assume that some people are gonna twist what you said. And deliberately in bad faith, misstate what you said, and you have no choice other than to keep talking. You can't say, well, gee, people are saying mean things. They're lying about my report. I guess I'll shut up. No, you know, I've seen auditors, some of the auditors, uh, Elaine Howell when she was the Auditor of California for like 20 years, was very aggressive in her work, but she had built a reputation of being trustworthy and people listened to her work. I mean, I think she had a marvelous impact when the state decided to completely change the way that they did electoral districts and they wanted to have a citizen commission to set it up. They tasked her with managing the recruiting and training of the citizen commission because she was the only one that the Rs and the Ds both trusted to do it professionally.
Conor:
So for those performance audit shops out there, or auditors general, maybe even, that are starting out on their journey to engage with the media or, or perhaps be more proactive leaning in terms of how they report and so forth. Are there any essential fundamentals you'd suggest they have in place?
Mark:
Well, you think carefully about what the message is in the report. Think about how that might be able to be distorted. Game it out with your staff, you know, figure out if I say a, what will happen if I say B, how can that be misinterpreted? it can't be off the cuff. It has to be just like your audit report, carefully managed, look around the audit, community, if you are a county auditor or a city auditor or a state auditor look around, and figure out, which of your peers seems to be doing this well. And talk to 'em. Some of the best advice and training I got was from my colleagues around the country, and frankly, in today's world, around the world.
Yusuf:
You were talking there about the California State Audit Office. Often the reports are titled with the conclusion almost. It's not we audited this. It's we found this as the conclusion. Do you think that sort of language or that sort of approach might help with defining what the message is that would be pushed out by the media?
Mark:
I think being very clear and direct and again, as I mentioned earlier, using graphics and pictures and so forth. Yes, I think that helps a lot. Now years ago, I would hear people say, well, the report speaks for itself. Well, that's baloney. That's not true. No, it doesn't actually. And so you do have to do, summaries. I've looked at audit reports, around the world, , and some of them are very good, very clear about this is why we did this audit. This is what we looked at. This is what we found. This is why it matters. This is what we think the legislature or parliament or whomever should do. And they can do that in a page at the front of the report. That Indigenous children's ear health, , audit that I mentioned is a pretty good example of that. Some of the auditors are more, creative, or clever, uh, how they do it. There's an audit of environmental regulation in the Netherlands by the Supreme Audit Office there. It's something like, um, managing in the dark. And what they meant was that there was almost no information about the impact of their regulatory work. And in fact, a lot of the companies that were supposed to be being regulated to limit the environmental damage they did, were not effectively regulated because the managers didn't have the information. Another audit here in the United States, the Long Beach, California City Auditor, did an audit of the library system, looking specifically at the issue of equity, where, different groups across the community served equally by the library And the answer was no, and it was very clear at the front of the report. This is why we did this. This is what we found pictures, graphs, and so forth.
Yusuf:
Talking about graphs, what have you seen, in terms of visualization over the years? And do you think that, as a performance audit profession we've, embraced visualization and the use of data enough.
Mark:
So I think, yes, the answer is yes, they've embraced it. Are they uniformly good at it? No. , but they're pointing in the right direction. It's a lot better than it was 20 years ago. You know, tables and charts and that's it. There's a lot of experimentation. Some of it works less well. I was not able to attend the ,annual conference of the Association of Local Government Auditors here this year. I think it was in May, but I heard from half a dozen auditors that there was a presentation there that was really, really good on visualization of data. So, I mean, it was a plenary session at the conference, obviously the conference organizers thought that it was something people cared about and whoever did it, did it well. And so a lot of auditors left that, with good ideas about how to do it better. And again, my bias again, is to look at audits in other countries. But, there's an audit that I looked at, in, um, Gambia on, O B G Y N, childbirth and how well women were being treated. And there were tremendous disparities in regions of the country. And there were charts and graphs and photos. You could see, this is what the women's health center and this rural area looked like. Uh, and there was only one transfusion machine and so on and so forth. And this is what it looked like in the city. And it was very nice. Rural obstetric care was the audit and it's very clear. And I interviewed the person who led the audit and yes, it got attention and yes, changes were being made.
Yusuf:
So as a senior performance auditor, and politician, when you hear about data being used, either visualized or being used for underlying calculations and answering the questions. What are the sorts of things that come to your mind in terms of what was actually done with the data or how it was done? What are the questions that that raises, in your mind?
Mark:
Well, of course you wanna know what the methodology is, what the source of the data was. whether or not you could essentially trust the source of the data. when you're looking at. Say you're looking at, hundreds of thousands of 911 calls. It's important to know what the, , person at the call center is actually doing. how was that data being entered in the first place by the person two operators sitting side by side code, the same kind of call differently. and I don't think auditors do enough of that stuff. I mean, clearly, they're getting more and more sophisticated about data analysis. I had an auditor tell me the other day that, we're almost like moving beyond sampling. It's now all the data, you know, so it wouldn't be a sample of 911 calls. It would be all of them, because we have the capacity to do that now. And that's all great. but , that first instance. How is that happening? And I, and I don't think, we're doing enough of that. Get up off the chair, step away from your computer, go to the 911 call center and start talking to people and watching what they do. And interview some of the folks who are actually entering the data. There's no substitute for, doing that kind of most elementary work.
Conor:
So you mentioned there are quite a few interesting reports from around the world, and why they were interesting. And you also spoke about the importance and the growth of the focus on equity as performance auditors, whereas traditionally, maybe we've focused on the normal three Es of economy efficiency, effectiveness. Do you think there's any, option to bring equity into the fold with the other three Es to make it a core focus area for performance auditors?
Mark:
Oh, I think absolutely. I think that trend is well underway. GAO has finally, started to recognize that in the audit standards here in the United States, but the auditors were there ahead of them, they were doing the work beforehand. And I've gone through a lot of the INTOSAI standards, and it's not named directly. But then when you go into the IDI stuff, and they start talking about, making sure that you look at marginalized groups and so on and so forth, and it's very clear, where the direction is. So I think, some auditors resist that, they tell me that it's a slippery slope and it's value judgements, and so on and so forth. And yet, in audit, after audit, you can see data analysis. I mean, when you look at, things like property tax assessments, in counties, in the US, say in Chicago and Cook County, and you look at the tax records and you see that there is, a significant difference, between the property tax assessments for people of color and white people, that cannot be explained by any other factors. a colleague of mine here at my company, Funkhouser and Associates, Liz Farmer, does a regular newsletter on financing government called Long Story Short, and in her most recent issue, she talks about a paper that was presented at the municipal finance conference here in the US in July. That shows that, communities that are, predominantly of color pay more interest on their bonds than communities that aren't. And there's a penalty of something like 30 or 40 basis points. And so those communities for say a hundred million dollar bond issue are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars more for no obvious reason. I highly recommend taking a look at her newsletter. It's easier to read than to read the paper, she's read the paper for you. That sort of stuff, it just keeps coming. We just find it over and over and over. And those are hard numbers, that's not some value judgment.
Conor:
It's good to see the growth and maturity around the adoption of equity as a key focus area for performance auditors. Are there any blind spots? Or areas that you think are continually underdone or that as performance auditors we haven't tapped into as yet,
Mark:
I think we're not good yet at going at central issues. We tend to hit more peripheral issues. When we look at the concerns of citizens, and the concerns of the elected officials that, govern a particular state or country or community, we should be saying to ourselves is what we are doing relevant. To them, for instance, um, in my day job here, I interview local officials, a lot and I ask them, what are your priorities? What are your challenges? Well, the huge issue here in the United States is affordable housing and homelessness. Well as an auditor, if you're not auditing issues related to affordable housing and homelessness, as part of the portfolio of audits that you're doing in a given year, there's no excuse you need to be there. Another issue that is top of mind, is recently after years of decline, we've had an uptick in violent crime. Well, what are you doing there? And there's been, a steady erosion of, homicide case clearance rates, in the United States, case clearance rates have always been terrible for other crimes like burglary and so forth. But now, you could look at the data and you could say, well, you got a 50-50 shot at getting away with murder in the US. Well, why is that? You know, what's going on there? The Portland City Auditor, maybe 10 years ago, did a very good, very sophisticated audit on case clearance rates, that of course got in tremendous controversy. And I think the police chief ultimately got fired over the thing. But, that's a central issue. You know, if you ask people, do they care about crime and homicide? Well, yeah, they do. And so those sorts of things. And then, I think that we're starting to use what I'll call big data I think there's a lot of opportunity to do more with data in areas like, crime. If there are, in Kansas city, 5,000 burglaries then looking at all 5,000 of them, and looking at, key characteristics. Which ones are solved, which ones are not, how are the police responding to them? I mentioned 911 calls, so there are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of 911 calls. How are they being handled? What's the average time? Why is it what it is? How does it vary? There's so many questions that you could look at with the data. And again, to go back to the point I made earlier, of course you want to know, in the first instance, how is it being put in? And sometimes looking at the mass of data gives you a clue that there's something wrong on the front end with the way it's being entered.
Yusuf:
So there's been a range of COVID related audits, over the last couple of years. Of course, with massive stimulus and other rescue packages that have been going on. How long do you think that will go on for, in terms of audits?
Mark:
As long as the stimulus money is being spent, which is for the next 5, 6, 7 years, there will be audit work around it. In fact, the audit work is just now sort of starting to get geared up, because the audit work most of the time comes in after the fact. After the money's been spent. There is something in the US called the single audit, which is, um, if you receive over, uh, $750,000 in federal money than you're subject to, more stringent audit requirements by the federal auditors. Usually, through a commercial CPA firm, there's gonna be a lot of jurisdictions that never, ever had a single audit before. Cause they never got $750,000 and now they got 5 million. So they're sort of audit virgins. It'll be interesting to see how they handle that and what's happened, especially with the initial money, the CARES Act and ARPA, is that cities and states were put in a role that they hadn't been before of dealing with hundreds and hundreds of new vendors that they had not dealt with before. So some of that is going to have not gone well. It's hard. Cities and counties right now in the US are under enormous staffing constraints, so they have to distribute more money than they've ever distributed to people that they've never dealt with before. And I have, a fourth less staff than I used to help sounds to me like, challenge. The last thing on, on that is in ARPA and especially in the, Infrastructure, Investment and Jobs Act the I, I, J, A the federal government, in addition to all the normal reporting that they have, have required various kinds of outcomes reporting. So you spend all this money. How is the community better off? Well, that's good. I'm really glad they did that. Are the local governments good at being able to comply with that? No. , so that's gonna be really challenging for them, but it's it's time we would like to know you spent, a hundred million. Is anybody better off?
Yusuf:
Last question for me, , you obviously have been involved in the International Center for Performance Auditing. non-profit that aims to promote performance auditing and strengthen the capacity of PA organizations in the world. Do you wanna talk a little bit about that and, and where you think PA is going overall? Ideally with, the help and involvement from the ICPA.
Mark:
Yeah. So the reason, , we created the ICPA is when I was doing the research on my book, and interviewing auditors from around the world and asking them what are their biggest challenges? What they told me was that staffing was the biggest challenge. You can't go to school and get a degree in performance auditing. You can't learn how to do that. and I was also struck, as I've mentioned throughout this podcast with the similarity of the challenges that they were dealing with, and the degree to which they could help each other, and really across levels of government. Whether it's a Supreme audit institution or a subnational, province or a state, or whether it's a local government. Some of the stuff is exactly the same and could be mutually supportive. So I, convened a group of folks in Kansas City back in like March of 2009 from around the world, about 80 auditors from, Europe, China, South America and said, so what do you think, is this a good idea? Should we do this? And the answer was yes, uh, we should. And we have been working steadily. We're a very small group of volunteers. One of the things that became clear is if we're gonna do the kind of training and so forth that we are talking about, we need to have some sort of certification program. And I talked to groups like the CAAF and others. And they said, yes, that's right. There should be a certification program. We don't want to take the lead on it, but we would be happy to support you if you did. And so I have been working, to develop a certification program for performance auditors. The ICPA is administratively housed at the Andrew Young School of Local Government, at the Georgia State University here. And we have worked with Georgia State. I'm currently putting the finishing touches on an online training course for auditors. Something that Georgia State will offer, they will provide administrative support for our certification program. We will help them stand up training program. and the focus, is first of all, it's online. And second of all, it's very international. So some of the audits that I mentioned, are in the training course, I've done interviews, recorded interviews as part of the course with maybe 15 different audit experts from around the world. I want people to understand that there is a global community here.
Conor:
How can performance auditors from the global community sign up to that course?
Mark:
It's not live yet. I'm gonna do a pilot test. But I would say that it will be live by the fall, but they could reach out to me. And, uh, I would love to be in touch with auditors. You can reach me at mark@mayorfunk.com, M A R K at mayor F U N K . com. And I like nothing better than talking to auditors from around the world.
Yusuf:
Excellent. Mark, thank you very much for being with us on the show. We'll put links to as much as we can of what you spoke about in the show notes. There's a lot there, so it might be quite a long list, but we'd also, as and when there are updates from the ICPA , and from the course, we'll try to include, that both on this show and also in the little newsletter that we send out. So thank you for that. Do appreciate it, and hope to see you again on The Performance Audit Report.
Mark:
All right. Thank you very much.
