Marion Higa was an A-B-C person in a big way, long before she turned her attention to the 1-2-3 that has become her career as the state’s auditor.
It’s hard to imagine, after almost 41 years working up the ranks of the analysts in her office to the top job about 20 years ago, that she once aspired to be a teacher, and that the bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Higa’s pocket were both in education, specializing in English and social studies.
Moving back to Hawaii after grad school, she angled for an educational research job before returning to the classroom, but as luck would have it, the state auditor’s office had just embarked on a massive audit of the state Department of Education and was lacking anyone with educational expertise.
Meanwhile, a DOE official came knocking on her door with a classroom job offer.
"He said, ‘I beg you to take this job because we can’t find anybody to teach Latin and French,’" she recalled. "I said, ‘I think I’ll try the auditor’s office for a couple of years and take my chances.’
"My children were very young then, and my friends who were teachers said, ‘What? You’re going to give up summers and Christmas and all that?’ And I said, ‘Oh, this sounded interesting.’ And I never left."
Higa, 69, most recently was in the news because of her report criticizing the performance of the state’s charter schools system, but she’s developed too thick a skin over the years to be unsettled by the reaction from that. Former Gov. Linda Lingle responded with a rebuke after a takedown of state investment management and charged that Higa herself should be investigated.
"It was probably the sharpest reaction, but it wasn’t the first time," she said. "I think Gov. (Ben) Cayetano got miffed about something, and so did Gov. (John) Waihee. But they were smaller items. This was much bigger … because we were on the mark. And it was a huge embarrassment.
"I don’t take any of this personally," she added. "I understand where all of these auditees are coming from, and what their own motivations are. I think part of the problem is where they know we’re solid on the facts, and they try to spin it. … To me, that part’s dirty pool."
QUESTION: Can you tell me about your office functions and history?
ANSWER: First off, we have a wide range of backgrounds, so we’re not all CPAs. We do have CPAs, because part of our work is financial statement audits. And also, because even as we do performance audits, we will have financial pieces. And they also bring a certain structure to the work. What we need are people with good analytical skills and good writing skills. … And when I say "analytical skills," it means some skepticism, some ability to look at material and say, "How does this connect with that other piece of information? Where does this fit? And can I really believe this?"
This is a constitutional office. It’s not always that in every other state. Not all the state auditors are constitutionally created. Some of them do only financial statement audits. But our language is broad, and that’s because of our history. When we had a constitutional convention in order to put together a Constitution and thereby apply for statehood back in 1950, what our delegates had was a history of every other state before us. So when they looked at the function of the auditor, they looked at it as a watchdog function on behalf of the Legislature, which is responsible for imposing taxes and appropriating the money. In many other states, the audit function was in the executive branch. But our delegates said that didn’t make sense because then they’re auditing themselves, since most of the spending is in the executive branch.
So from the beginning they said the auditor needs to be in the legislative branch. And making it a constitutional office and giving it certain protections, even against individual legislators, would assure there would be honest work.
Q: So the state Constitution protects the office from being dismantled by statute?
A: That’s right — which happened in California, at a time that California had a severe constriction in the late ’80s and into the early ’90s. Their state audit office was wiped out because the legislature didn’t give it any money. And then two years later the governor says, "Hey, federal requirements are that we have to have audits done." So then they started creating an audit function in the governor’s office, and eventually it was statutorially created and given some protection.
In our case, not only was it constitutionally created, there were various provisions. For instance, each house voted separately, sitting in joint session. They don’t come together and vote in joint session very often. …
Q: You mean, the appointment of your position is done that way?
A: Yes. … It’s an eight-year term, longer than any elected official. Voting to appoint is by majority vote. But removal has to be by two-thirds vote, again in each house voting separately in joint session — and for cause. That’s a very high bar, and that protects anyone you appoint from removal. …
Q: About your educational background: Do you lean on it at all, especially when the topic is education, such as the charter schools audit?
A: Oh, yeah. It’s two ways. I think it gives us more credibility when you talk to educators that at least there’s somebody around here that understands their language, understands a little bit, even if it’s been a while since I’ve been in school. I understand what they’re doing and what their approach is, and I try to keep up.
Q: How did you approach the schools audit, and is there a general process?
A: Our work is structured. There’s a planning phase, a field work phase and the report writing and production phase. So at certain key points along the way on every project, all the minds come together so that we have people not directly involved in the project looking at the product that’s coming up from the teams to see if they meet the (federal Government Accountability Office) standards. … And we have direct input, we get the drafts, we get their proposed plans, we challenge them, we send them back.
So when it comes to the education audits I probably have the lead because I know education. So it does help our work. And I think the auditees will think twice about challenging that we’re even engaging in educational work. …
Very often auditees will say, "Well, there’s nobody on the team that’s an educator; you should have had all educators on the audit team." That’s not the point. The point is that it’s a management audit, so management principles apply, regardless of the auditee. It would apply to public housing, it would apply to anybody else. …
There are elements to a finding that must be there. They have to do with the condition: What is it that we see? The criteriA: What is it supposed to be, whether it’s the law that requires it, or professional standards? What is the effect? You can have a condition and go, "Oh my God," but if it’s minimal or doesn’t affect too many people, it’s so what? Nothing to report.
Then you have to get to cause: What caused all of these three factors? Because if you don’t find the cause, you can’t suggest a fix, which is the recommendation.
Q: Is there a common finding you make, typically?
A: If it’s a statute that’s weak, then we recommend that the Legislature consider amending the statute. Most of the time, however, the problem will be within the agency, and it may be at the governance level — by that I mean a governing board — if the board doesn’t have policies and procedures, if it hasn’t enacted administrative rules, there’s nothing the people below them can do. A good example would be the two attempts to close the Waters of Life charter school. The state tried twice to close that school down; twice they lost in court because the board had not enacted administrative rules. It’s a classic example of why your governing entity has to do its job.
Q: Did your own voice figure a lot in the charter schools report, because of your experience?
A: Charter schools in particular. … The fight became one between the charter schools and the DOE because the allocation was a cut away from DOE’s money. So DOE was very resistant to having X amount of dollars taken away from their budget on a per-capita basis for the students who were migrating away to the charter schools.
So we got plucked into this because the legislators said nobody trusted anybody in the system. They gave me the job of deciding how much money should go to these charter schools. For several years (in the 1990s), we had the allocation assignment.
And I fought it because I said there’s an independence problem here. You cannot have us allocate money and eventually be given the task of auditing what they did with the money. So after several years of talking it up, I was able to persuade the legislators to take us out of the allocation business. … Eventually it was done by the Legislature, because now it’s a separate budget item.
Q: Do you have to wait for the Legislature to ask that an audit be done?
A: We have the power to initiate audits; that’s another authority that not all auditors have. We (also) initiate audits at the request of the Legislature; that’s by concurrent resolution or act or budget proviso.
We initiated an audit of Waters of Life and found that the books were unauditable, virtually, because they had very strange accountant codes and all this. Basically, they’re running in the red.
All of that experience was telling us that there are some fundamental weaknesses in the way the state was approaching charter schools.
Q: How hands-on are you about the production of an audit?
A: I can read a report six, seven, eight times before it goes out the door. I even do tech edits and second edits, because I’m also a speller. (Laughs) That’s my English part.
