Welsh will be missed

Anyone meeting state Legislative Auditor General Wayne Welsh on the street would hardly consider him a relentless bulldog. He's soft-spoken and courteous, with a pleasant face.

But his audits through the years have made bureaucrats quake like frightened children in a cemetery on Halloween.

Welsh has just retired after 30 years of fearless and unbiased scrutiny of state agencies. We're going to miss him — not just because his audits often led to spectacular front-page stories about financial mismanagement or appalling conditions in public places, but because his work of looking at government without fear or favor was a good complement to what newspapers do.

Welsh's job was to examine any agency state lawmakers asked him to examine. The danger, of course, was that he would see his job as one of pleasing those lawmakers by giving them what they wanted, rather than the cold, hard truth. But Welsh demonstrated time and again that he wasn't going to play that game. Lawmakers themselves often didn't want to hear what he found out. And bureaucrats almost always would rather he stayed away.

Way back in 1989, he examined the state Retirement Office and found salaries 27 percent hirer than market, nepotism throughout the office, double payments of travel expenses and excessive benefits. These were things completely overlooked by the private firm that audited the office yearly. The director of that office was a close friend of the governor, and yet he ended up resigning in the ensuing wave of bad publicity.

In 1988, Welsh uncovered $3.5 million in blatant misuse of public funds among eight employees at the Timpanogos Community Mental Health Center. The report led to criminal charges and devastated the facility, which eventually had to change its name to overcome the scandal. But patients and their relatives were grateful.

Those are only two examples out of many. But they served to establish Welsh's reputation as a no-nonsense auditor whose first master was the truth.

Other times, the startling things Welsh revealed didn't lead to wholesale changes. Politics is, of course, a big part of what goes on under the dome of the state Capitol, and lawmakers often bow to it first. Fortunately, none of that ever seemed to seep under Welsh's door.

A nationwide search is under way for a replacement. We hope the top criterion is a fearless determination to gather facts, regardless of who may not want them to be gathered. Whether the new auditor looks like a bulldog is, apparently, not important.