Auditor Keith Faber

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right, let's bring in auditor State Auditor Keith Faber,

(00:03):
who's joining us now, and Auditor Faber, Welcome again to
the Mark Blazer Show. Happy New Year to you, my friend.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Happy new year. If we can still say that. Somebody
said that we're coming up on the date where you're
no longer with this.

Speaker 3 (00:17):
This is it. Yeah, today's the last day after this.
It's not after it's you don't know who cares if
it's happy and it's just a year. So today's the
last day you can actually yea.

Speaker 1 (00:25):
But well wait a second, but what about if you
haven't seen the people since New Year's that you kind
of want to say that to, like, for instance, auditor
fab but.

Speaker 3 (00:34):
You need to step up your socializing game into Marshall.

Speaker 1 (00:37):
Oh well, I guess maybe I should have contacted you already,
Auditor Favor.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
I guess yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:43):
I thought we were closer than that. But there you go.
Get I get called on day five.

Speaker 1 (00:49):
I'm sorry, I guess yeah, I should have. Uh so, man,
when we get into you know, everything going on right
now with the daycare and thes and I didn't get
to watch Governor DeWine here a little while ago, a
little over an hour ago. I guess he was doing
a presser. I did see that popped up on my

(01:09):
phone and I was trying to watch, but I was
getting ready for the show, and at that point I
was it was, you know, crunch mode when he came
on a little after two thirty, I suppose. But so,
what did you I know that you had kind of
mentioned during our text exchange earlier today that he was
going to be doing that, and you were kind of
interested to hear what what in fact he was going
to be talking about or whatever. So what was your

(01:30):
takeaway from that, if if anything, I.

Speaker 2 (01:34):
Think the Governor did a nice job outlining what the
department's current fraud review processes are. I think at first,
to start out with that, it's important that people remember
that in the State Auditor's Office, we audit agencies, so
I would audit the Governor's agencies and other entities. We
don't audit sub recipients, so we don't audit recipient's benefits

(01:55):
because to do that's just not what we're set up
and it's not what we're designed to do. It's on
the people providing those benefits to audit those people, to
make sure they're not lying, stealing, and cheating. And so
what the Governor did was did a nice job outlining
the things that the department does to try and avoid
people cheating with regard to childcare claims. Now, what we

(02:17):
do in the Auditor's office is we look at what
they say their controls to avoid that are and see
whether they're testing against it, and then give them suggestions
when we think the controls need to be more robust.
And that's what we're going to do. And then when
we find specific evidences of fraud or that there's something
going on, we run all of those to ground, even
if it isn't a recipient case as what we're hearing

(02:40):
with regard to these alleged daycare things. I also thought
the governor did a really good job knocking down a
couple of the common ones that are circulating out there
on the internet. Specifically he knocked down I had had
my people do some research into a couple of these
that we see them as we see claims on the
internet and they become to our attention. If it alleges fraud,

(03:03):
we try and run it to ground. But one was
this entity called the Somalia Education and Resource Center, and
the governor made it clear that one of the allegations
is they opened up forty of these facilities on the
same day. That wasn't true. My people told me two
about a week a week and a half ago that
that was largely because of an update that the department

(03:23):
had done and its database, and what it did is
it reclassified all those on the two dates they did
the updates, even though the centers were offered opened years
and years before that. All the people on that database
had one or two start dates and that just wasn't correct.
It wasn't accurate, and so I understand why people were
concerned by that, and when we ran it the ground,
we just found that that wasn't in fact the case.

(03:45):
The database was wrong. Another thing, he found out that
this entity had been identified in the past of charging
for meals that effectively it never provided. And based on that,
the governor said that they're in litigation with them now, Well,
they haven't received money for over six months and they
haven't and they're they've been withholding money from this entity

(04:07):
since June twenty twenty five, and so that's interesting that
they snagged out on their own and that they're they're
engaged in fighting with that entity. That was helpful for
me to know we had not heard that part personally,
and so that that will help our investigators as we
go forward.

Speaker 1 (04:23):
Well, I don't think that's where.

Speaker 2 (04:24):
The governor said and where he's at at this point.
I think it was helpful to know that the controls
that they've got in place. I'm not sure it answers
all of my concerns and all the concerns that are
out there online, but it was helpful to at least
know that.

Speaker 1 (04:36):
That's what I was saying, like you know, you're bringing
up they were provided money for food, and then they
didn't provide that food, yet they received that. It's so
much bigger than that, And I know, you know that
as far as what people are looking at or looking into,
and I just you know, it's a the whole thing,
the way that it's playing out for the state of Ohio.

(04:57):
Is it a good reason to believe that, you know,
what we are seeing just right out on front Street
if you will, in Minnesota, what's happening there as far
as the you know, you know, the fraud, and I mean,
is that happening here? Is there a good reason to
believe it is. Or here's the other part, auditor Favor
and his auditor, Keith Favors joining us. Now it's like

(05:19):
getting local news to cover this and I'm talking straight
down the line called balls and strikes. It's ridiculous. It's
like you have to dig like a dog to try
to find out anything with regard to truth regarding this.
It's just like they want to spin everything and not
give you, you know, balls and strikes.

Speaker 2 (05:38):
If you will. Yeah, And that's that's interesting. And part
of it is a lot of the stuff you see
on social media or individuals, and I want individuals to
keep doing it and keep giving tips. And I tell
people all the time, a big chunk the majority of
our criminal investigations come from individual tips. So I want
people to go out to one eight sixty six product

(06:00):
h or Ohio auditor dot gov and give us your tips,
because we run one hundred percent of those tips to ground,
and if we find any fraud anyways, any abuse, we
run those to ground, and we're appropriate, we refer people
for prosecution. That was the interesting thing that came out
of some of this stuff in the governor's comments, where
they find fraud, they ought to be referring to prosecution.

(06:21):
I assume they are. I don't have information to back
that up, but we refer all things where we see
fraud and to make a prosecutor decide to charge or
not charge. But to go back to your original question,
the fact that we saw a bunch of fraud occur
in Minneapolis, up in Minnesota. Yeah, Minneapolis and up in Minnesota,

(06:42):
does that mean that we're having a lot of fraud
in Ohio. No, it doesn't. That you are unrelating, But
does it make me suspicious that the number one and
number three Somalian communities in the country got fraud that
seems to be systemic, that the number two community doesn't
have fraud. Look, I know two things are true. One,
we have fraud in Ohio and I also know we

(07:05):
have fraud in Ohio benefit programs. My question is what
are we doing to make sure that we don't have
fraud and these benefit programs? And are we taking a
look to track down every instance of fraud? And from
our perspective, we are doing what we can to track
that down and we are going to run every one
of these planes to ground because zero fraud is the goal.

(07:29):
Zero fraud is what we're going to work towards and
any fraud above zero is unacceptable, and so that's what
we do in the State Auditor's Office. I've convicted one
hundred and fifty three individuals from stealing from government agencies.
And again, what we do in this area is we
audit government. And so we go in and catch people
stealing from you know, your your local township, or you're

(07:51):
going to catch people stealing from the Columbus Zoo. You know,
we convicted those five individuals. These investigations are often very,
very complex, and they take a while. The Columbus Zoo
took us almost two years from start to finish, but
we put their top five people in prison. Favorite kind
of stuff the Auditor's Office does, and we do all
of that based on tips. May ask these people with

(08:13):
an investigations and audits.

Speaker 3 (08:14):
These people you prosecuted, were they directly or responsible? Or
is there is there a payment to be made to
society for those that look the other way refuse to
acknowledge things that they see within the department.

Speaker 2 (08:26):
Yeah, much much different question. Can can somebody who ignores
something that they should be saying be responsible? The short
answer is historically yes, but it's a little bit more difficult.
I got the legislature to pass the new law last year,
and that new law makes it an affirmative responsibility for

(08:47):
everybody in government if they see waste broader of use,
to contact the auditor's office and to report fraud. And
so that changed last year, and that happened as a
result of us working with the legislature to change the law.
And because of that, we've been engaged in a very
aggressive report fraud campaign across the state over the last

(09:08):
six months or so at the legislatures. The legislature provided
funding for it. And the reason for it was we
went to the legislature and said, look, we're seeing far
too many instances as auditor where we go in and
a local government had some knowledge of fraud and somebody
was slow on the switch to report it. And historically
they'd have to tell us who We come in and

(09:29):
do an audit. But remember an audit, by its very
nature is a year in arrears, and so we would
go in a year after the fraud occurred and they say, oh, yeah,
by the way, last year. Because we have a mandatory
requirement in our audits that they report fraud to us.
Last year we found out that our fiscal officer was
stealing a little bit, and yeah, we reported to the prosecutor,
but the prosecutor didn't do anything about it. And so

(09:50):
what happens now is they have to report it to
law enforcement into us almost immediately so that we can
go in and get it when we can get the
money back, and then we can come in and an investigation.
The other thing we found often was that we would
go in and we would do our investigation after somebody
suspected fraud and they thought somebody was stealing five hundred
dollars and we got in there and it was fifty thousand.

(10:13):
And the bottom line is is our forensic auditors, our
teams to go in and run the numbers, are very
very good at running things to ground. And because of that,
if they tell us early, we can stop it sooner
and we can usually find out the true scope of
the fraud. And that's why we have such a really
good track record of prosecuting.

Speaker 1 (10:32):
Very good state auditor Keith Favor, thank you so much
for jumping on with us once again. If somebody is
a suspects fraud, so on and so forth, what's the
phone number that they can call to reach your office one.

Speaker 2 (10:46):
Eight sixty six proto H one eight sixty six proto H,
or go to our website Ohio auditor dot gov. Very good.

Speaker 1 (10:53):
I'm going to say it one last time so I don't,
you know, get yelled at, but happy New Year, and
thank you very much UCH for joining it up.

Speaker 2 (11:00):
I'm with us today. Happy New Year. Keep out there,
keep watching and looking out for good government.

Speaker 1 (11:04):
Absolutely there he is auditor key favorite. Thanks brother, appreciate
you