After 30 years of auditing, Welsh is calling it a day

Almost 30 years ago, Utah's brand new Legislative Auditor General's Office hired a young accountant to help conduct management audits on state agencies.

That accountant, Wayne Welsh, will retire this week after spending 20 of those years as head of the office, overseeing hundreds of audits that have saved taxpayers an estimated $165 million.

Under Welsh's leadership, the office has been praised for providing one of the most important functions in state government. But it took time for the office, which reports to lawmakers, to be accepted.

"There were some times that agencies didn't know who we were, didn't know what our authority was, didn't know what the impact of our reports would be," Welsh said of the early days. "Of course, they feared the worst."

The office was seen, he said, as "doing the Legislature's bidding, basically, trying to follow their agenda. It took a few years to establish a reputation of being independent and unbiased, and reporting what we found, not reporting necessarily what people thought we should find."

That started to change in 1976, Welsh said, when the office was asked to take a closer look at a request from the Utah State Hospital for money for new facilities. The audit found problems at the Provo facility for the mentally ill, including a supply of spoiled food.

"I think it was a watershed audit," Welsh said. "We were really pleased with what happened after we completed the audit, and that was that the state hospital did implement some better management practices in those areas we looked at."

Not every audit has been received so well. Welsh and his 25-member staff only make recommendations to lawmakers, and those recommendations aren't always accepted. That can be frustrating, he acknowledged.

Take the audit done in 1989 on the Utah Sports Foundation, a private organization with a state contract to promote amateur sports competitions. The foundation had started as a state entity created to help boost Salt Lake City's Olympic bid.

Welsh's office determined that foundation officials, including Dave Johnson, were double-billing for expenses. Conflicts of interest were also cited, as was the size of the pay raise Johnson received after the foundation was privatized.

Johnson went on to serve as vice president of both the Olympic bid effort and, later, the Salt Lake Organizing Committee before he was forced to resign at the height of the bid bribery scandal — 10 years after the audit.