Missouri auditor adds intrigue to agency’s work through ‘World’s Greatest Audit Podcast’
If a podcast episode titled “The audit of Ray County and the mystery of the 76 hams” seems worth listening to, then Missouri State Auditor Scott Fitzpatrick has succeeded.
Unbeknownst to many, “The World’s Greatest Audit Podcast,” is recorded here in the Show-Me State.
“Well, you know, it’s a low bar,” said Fitzpatrick, whose team’s work drives the narrative of the episodes — five so far.
Missouri’s 39th auditor is one of the voices that can be heard on the podcast that entertains listeners by detailing the oftentimes mundane world of state level auditing.
“We put out a hundred and something audit reports a year,” Fitzpatrick said. “Most people are not going to read those. The podcast is a way to reach people who don’t want to read audit reports. You know, you can click on it, listen to it while you’re driving.”
Creating “The World’s Greatest Audit Podcast” is one way that Fitzpatrick attempts to change conversations around government and educate people on what he calls “inappropriate expenses.”
Fitzpatrick said the business he opened in high school, MariCorp U.S., is the reason he decided to enter the world of politics.
“I was 24 years old when I ran for the House of Representatives. And I did it because I was a business owner,” Fitzpatrick said. He served in the state House for five years.
His marine products company grew to over 30 employees by the time Fitzpatrick graduated from college.
“After getting into business and becoming a taxpayer and dealing with different bureaucracies, it seemed like every day, I really started to get frustrated with government,” he said. “It wasn’t because I didn’t want to pay taxes or anything like that. It was just because it seemed like it was so nonresponsive to the needs of citizens.”
This frustration with bureaucracy led Fitzpatrick to the role he holds today.
“You can have an immediate impact on the way that the executive branch behaves if you’re in charge of the budget,” Fitzpatrick said.
He said he leads an agency that has about 125 personnel, including some 80 auditors. The auditors typically work in teams to carry out their audits, varying in size based on the expected workload. The rest of the team deals with administrative work.
Fitzpatrick works with his team as well as auditors at the county level.
Boone County Auditor Kyle Rieman said that the state level auditors don’t interpose day-to-day with his auditing department or have a ton of interaction but they do offer tips and information.
Rieman said Fitzpatrick’s team comes to their annual training and works with them, discussing things they have seen on routine audits. He also praised Fitzpatrick for not sticking too closely to political party lines.
“I think (Fitzpatrick) tries to take a very fair, fairly nonpartisan approach,” Rieman said. “I think a lot of county auditors do, you know, we’re not really into the partisan aspect.”
“We have to run as a party, but our job primarily is kind of calling balls fair and calling balls fouls,” Rieman said.
On the state level, Fitzpatrick’s team handles a lot of what he calls “quick and dirty audits,” but if he is especially interested in an audit he gets involved and surveys things deeper than he otherwise would.
“There are some audits where I have some personal interest that I want to make sure, hey, this is going to be a high-profile audit, and I want to make sure we do a good job on it,” he said.
A common issue, Fitzpatrick said, is money being inappropriately used to make contributions or donations to nonprofits.
His office recently published a report detailing an audit done on the Randolph County Sheriff’s Department that uncovered over $222,000 that had been misused.
Some of the money was used to buy toys to donate to kids. Over $9,500 was used for lodging at a Margaritaville Resort.
“As an elected official, if I want to give money to a cause, a church or a food bank, or a pregnancy care center or whatever, that’s something I can either do from my own personal funds or I can do it from my campaign funds that I fundraise with,” Fitzpatrick said. “You can’t use public money to just do charitable stuff.”
“I think there’s potentially criminal charges coming on that one,” he said.
Fitzpatrick said he will probably record a podcast episode about the audit of the Randolph County Sheriff’s department.
Prior audits, he said, can help inform his team on what to look at next. Besides that, the auditors also receive whistleblower tips or follow the agenda that Fitzpatrick ran for office on.
One of the priorities during Fitzpatrick’s campaign for auditor in 2022 was to figure out a successful way to audit Missouri’s public schools.
“We spent a lot of money on schools, and we were not auditing any of them,” Fitzpatrick said. “We’re trying to build a school audit program, basically, and kind of figuring out the best way to audit a school district and what to look at so that you can make sure that the time we’re spending there is actually having a positive effect on the kids.”
The auditing team doesn’t have the power to come in and overhaul how a system works or give an operation a new set of guidelines to run things profitably.
“We’re not going to be the ones to be able to tell them how they’re going to solve their budget problem. The board is going to have to do that,” Fitzpatrick said.
“We identify: here’s the problem. This is how long you have before you run out of money. The recommendation we have is for you to start planning immediately,” he added.
Fitzpatrick won the election for auditor in 2022 against Alan Green and replaced Nicole Galloway, the last state level Democrat in office.
Speaking of his predecessor, Fitzpatrick said, “They didn’t do any school stuff. Honestly, they weren’t doing much at the end because the staffing was so low. When I got here, we had 89 total people. So that was not a good situation. I wouldn’t say it was a shift in priorities. It was just more like things were added that were not getting done.”
A good amount of his team’s energy at the beginning was getting up to pace to where he felt they could be most productive. This included increasing staffing and changing how the team shared files.
“When you go campaigning for a year and a half running for office and you get elected to it and you show up, it’s a real frustrating experience to show up and realize that you don’t have people here to do what you campaigned on,” Fitzpatrick said.
Despite coming from different political parties, Fitzpatrick said he thinks both he and Galloway have the same end goals.
“We want to make government work more efficient, and we want to identify waste and taxpayer money and fraud where it occurs and hold those people accountable,” he said. “I think the way in which we were going about doing that is starkly different.”
Fitzpatrick is over halfway through his first term as auditor, following a four-year stint as treasurer.
The current state treasurer, and Fitzpatrick’s successor, is Vivek Malek, who was appointed by Republican Gov. Mike Parson after Fitzpatrick’s election to auditor. Malek was elected to a full term in November 2024.
In the early days of Fitzpatrick’s term, he was tasked with auditing his previous department, the Treasury.
During the audit, Fitzpatrick’s team uncovered almost $35 million in interest deposited in the wrong account. The money was meant for the general revenue fund but put towards improving Interstate 70.
Despite the two departments butting heads, Fitzpatrick said, “When you’re auditing somebody and you put the information out that they may not like, it can probably strain relationships. But so far, I mean, we’re fine. We don’t have any issues.”
“Collaboration between the Treasurer’s Office and other state agencies — including the State Auditor’s Office — remains open, constructive, and focused on serving the public interest,” Malek’s communication director said in an email.
Fitzpatrick hasn’t formally launched his reelection campaign but says he plans on running.
“I’d like to have another term to kind of reap the benefits of the work we’ve done to rebuild the office and use the skill sets that we’ve built over the last two and a half years to kind of go one more term and have the impact I was hoping to be able to have immediately,” he said.
Following the interview Fitzpatrick was preparing to meet with his communications director, Trevor Fox, to record another episode of the agency’s podcast.
Fox handles a lot of the production for the show, Fitzpatrick said: “He’s like a one man wrecking ball. He does it all, man.”
That’s some high praise for a producer of what may be the ‘World’s Greatest Audit Podcast.’
As for the case of the 76 missing hams, the audit office doesn’t have an exact answer on where the hams went. According to the first episode of the podcast, they believe the former sheriff gifted the hams, bought with the inmate commissary fund, to other sheriff’s office employees.
This story originally appeared in the Columbia Missourian. It can be republished in print or online.
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