That’s really stupid. Rich Miller points out part of the CMS response here. He points out that the reporters love the office and that’s true–the auditor essentially writes stories for them by doing the job of auditor, but more importantly Holland can’t be painted as a partisan hack given his reappointment was unanimous and he was Chief of Staff to Phil Rock when Rock was Senate President.
Rich also reports that he think he heard:
Listening to the auditor general’s press conference. What I just heard, I think, is that CMS apparently conducted an investigation of Bill Holland’s office to see if they could impugn his integrity before the release of the audit.
Holland has a long history working with Lege Members and an attack on him will only hurt CMS–he’s worked both as state lobbyist in DC and for Dems in key committees. His relationships across the aisle are very strong too. He’s solid.
The only criticism one can make of him as 12 years as Auditor is that the auditor has an incentive to keep the Lege happy. Simply put, attacking him says nothing about what he found. The worst is when the CMS response is to whine that he didn’t say anything good about the agency’s practices.
Largely, an audit finds area of non-compliance and points them out–pointing out that someone is in compliance is done with one sentence. It’s a PR ploy and not a serious rebuttal.
If the Governor tries to turn this into a PR fight, he’ll lose bad. He should accept the report, fire the appointed employees and move a new team in accepting responsiblity. It’ll be the only way to take the bite out of this.
This report gives the media a tool which to dissect every agencies dealings with CMS and keep an eye on what is occurring. Ignoring it will just keep a constant drip of revelations coming for the next year and a half.