The Iowa Supreme Court has ruled the state auditor does not have the authority to investigate an insurance risk pool for 75 counties as well as hundreds of other cities and taxpayer funded local government entities.
The Iowa Communities Assurance Pool provides property and casualty insurance coverage. State Auditor Rob Sand had filed a subpoena seeking records about annual meetings the risk pool’s board of directors held at out of state resorts.
The state’s highest court has ruled the risk pool was formed under a section of Iowa law that does not fall under the oversight of the state auditor’s office. In a written statement, Sand said the Supreme Court pointed out “it might be good: to subject local government risk pools that are “entirely funded by tax dollars” to some oversight and he is asking legislators to take that step.
Three Republican state senators say the ruling may show the auditor has abused his subpoena power and their bill to restrict what Sand can investigate is needed.
“He has subpoena power,” Senator Mike Klimesh, a Republican from Spillville, told Radio Iowa, “but we want to make sure that he’s not using it an an overarching method to, you know, unfairly reach out to Iowans that aren’t positioned in local government entities that would require them to provide him subpoenaed information.”
Klimesh and two other Republican senators have asked Sand to provide them with the records of all the subpoenas the state auditor’s office has issued since Sand took office in January of 2019. “To ensure that his office is not going beyond his authority to execute subpoenas on private individuals and, if that if in fact happening, we have a right to know about it,” Klimesh said, “and I think Iowans have a right to know about it.”
Sand, the only Democrat holding statewide office, says the records request is “a distraction” from the bill Senators passed that outside analysts say would prevent his office from doing complete audits of state agencies and lead to the state government losing billions of dollars in federal funds. Sand has sent the senators a copy of the subpoena he issued to managers of the insurance risk pool for local governments.