Steve Sonnier:
Hello all, and welcome back to From the Front Row brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. If this is your first time listening to us, welcome. We are a student-run podcast that focuses on major issues across the field of public health. My name is Steve Sonnier, and today I am joined by Rob Sand, the Iowa Auditor of State. Rob received his BA from Brown University and his JD from the University of Iowa College of Law. He was an assistant attorney general in the Iowa Attorney General’s office from 2010 to 2017. Rob, pleasure to have you on the show.

Rob Sand:
Thanks for having me Steve. I’m happy to be here. And also, I have to tell everybody, and to you, thanks again for joining us up in Cedar Rapids last weekend and helping folks dig out from under that derecho.

Steve Sonnier:
So if you can start us from the top, talking about your role as the state auditor and what you do for the people of Iowa.

Rob Sand:
Sure. Easiest way to describe this role is watchdog. We investigate what’s going on. We issue reports. What happens with those reports is up to other individuals or entities that are in charge of enforcement. But what we do is essentially we conduct audits and investigations. The audits include financial transactions, but also legal compliance. And they also include efficiency. The investigations are oriented generally towards public corruption, malfeasance, waste, fraud, and abuse, that sort of stuff. So essentially, all the money that is getting spent at the state level is under our purview. Local funds are under our purview in certain circumstances. And in addition to that, entities that are private but receive public money can also be audited under certain circumstances by our office.

Steve Sonnier:
And within that pretty big scope of practice, it sounds like, what are some of the most prominent challenges and successes that come to your mind when you’re taking on this position and with your team, as well?

Rob Sand:
One of our big challenges is just workload, honestly. We’ve got about a hundred employees in the office. That goes up and down a little bit, but everyone is busy. We have a ton of work that we’ve got to do and limited resources to do it with. So we’re always trying to assess where best to put our time, where best to put our energies. And it’s a constant challenge and it doesn’t change.

Rob Sand:
I think one of our big successes, and we could point to some specific audits since I’ve taken office in the last year and a half, we’ve issued, I think, the third largest dollar amount special investigation that the office has done in the last 20 years.

Rob Sand:
We obviously had a fairly consequential audit regarding Test Iowa recently. But I don’t know that you can define success by a particular audit. I think, really, the machine and how well the machine is running is a better determinant of that. And I think one of the ways that I define success is doing the right thing, which is a lot harder to quantify. But at the end of the day, that comes down to having people sitting at the table who think differently from each other, but who come there with the same purpose, which is to serve the public, and who are interested in doing that in a moral and ethical way, rather than an ideological way.

Rob Sand:
So to me, a big success was setting up my team to do that from the start. Out of the three senior positions in the office, we’ve got a Democrat and Independent and a Republican. And that’s important to me because I want everyone in the State of Iowa to feel represented, and everyone in the State of Iowa to know that when we’re sitting here making decisions, that people who think differently are being represented, and that what we look at and how we look at it is being determined by that group of people, rather than having it be done in a political manner.

Steve Sonnier:
Right. And you would think that the idea of truth would be a nonpartisan issue. And that’s fantastic that you’ve got that level of representation and especially such an important role as dealing with so many audits and transparency and everything that’s in that realm.

Rob Sand:
No, that’s exactly right. I mean, at the end of the day, we are supposed to have, we should have truth leading our politics, rather than ideology leading it. George Washington, in his farewell address, said, “One of the most important things for us to do is watch out for partisanship.” And yet, here we are in a place where so many people are so divided, they can’t possibly conceive that a good idea or a good person could exist on the other side, which is terrible. We have to get back to an idea where we approach governance separately from politics, and that we approach governance with the idea that we needed to solve problems and do the right thing, rather than simply refuse to have any wins on the other side or something like that.

Steve Sonnier:
And that’s important to approach. I know that you had recently joined a bipartisan group of state auditors to determine how states are responding to this whole COVID-19 pandemic and the chaos within it. Can you tell us more about the vision and goals of this endeavor, as a whole?

Rob Sand:
Absolutely. I’m really excited about that because I think it sort of epitomizes, or should epitomize, at least since we’re just getting started with it, what this should be about, what I’m talking about. It’s a bipartisan group. The leadership of it includes Democrats and Republicans. It’s about evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. And it’s a bunch of states that are all, on their own, going to be asking the same questions.

Rob Sand:
So we’re going to look at testing data. We’re going to look at treatment data, and try to make sure that we’re having the maximum amount of transparency and accountability and integrity in those things. And the reason we’re doing that… There’s a few reasons why. One is, this is public health. There is no more important time to make sure the job was getting right then during a pandemic. We don’t know if we’re in the fourth quarter or the first quarter of this pandemic and we need to be learning what we can learn as soon as we can learn it, because the sooner we learn things, the sooner we can put that knowledge into practice and apply it in order to reduce both economic costs and health costs of the pandemic. So I’m excited about that.

Rob Sand:
And the other piece that I’m excited about is, it’s kind of acknowledging that we have this laboratory of democracy and that you’re going to see different approaches in different states. And so, by having different states ask the same questions about data, about testing, and about treatment, we’re going to be able to learn from each other, from those states, by comparing them, by seeing who’s doing what and maybe figuring out what works better and what doesn’t work as well.

Steve Sonnier:
Within that, you had mentioned the situation of Test Iowa and then a couple other entities across the whole pandemic spectrum that you’re looking into. Can you give some more examples about how your role in your office as a whole intersects with the field of public health?

Rob Sand:
Yeah, absolutely. Public health is one of those areas where governance is incredibly important. The public has to be involved with what’s going on. And yet at the same time, while you’re having the public involved with what’s going on, there’s got to be an entity advising them, helping them figure out what the right decisions are to make.

Rob Sand:
And so, our tie-ins to public health during a pandemic are very important, but the Department of Public Health is a regular client of ours. We audit them at least once a year, and we are always working with all of our clients, both, to some degree, as a partner to try to show them better ways to do things from an outside perspective. But then also sometimes as a poke to say, “Hey, you’re messing this up. That’s not a good way to be doing this.”

Rob Sand:
So we’re always just sort of trying to have that balance between wanting to be a partner to all of our state entities, but also at the same time, making sure that we’re conducting independent oversight of them and their decision-making.

Steve Sonnier:
And within the practice of that, I imagine a very large piece of it is communication, and especially when you’re dealing with difficult subjects like finances and public health implications. What is your strategy as an office and then as an individual when you’re coming across these difficult tenuous situations, at times, as a communicator?

Rob Sand:
I always try to go for transparency. And I always want to treat my listener as someone who is capable of understanding anything as long as it’s explained. There are way too many people in the public sector where you’re supposed to be representing the people, who treat the people like something to be divided, something to be talked down to as though they couldn’t understand something. I think that’s terrible. Anyone who’s in a position like ours, whether it’s the auditor’s role or anyone else’s, has a duty to just talk about things in a way that helps people understand them. Not because it’s hard for them to understand them, not because it’s necessarily too complex or they necessarily aren’t smart enough, it’s because they’re experts in what they do. If I was going to go talk to an auto mechanic, they would have to break it down for me.

Rob Sand:
I can fix and I can run a chainsaw a little bit, but when I was talking to a guy who was actually working on my chainsaw the other week, I was asking a lot of questions and he was doing a good job of explaining it to me as he was taking the carburetor apart. Because that is beyond my expertise, right?

Rob Sand:
We live in a world where a lot of us are experts in different areas, and so if we want to help people understand them, we just have to explain them in a way that recognizes that that person we’re talking to is both intelligent and capable of understanding it, and yet also probably not coming at it with the same level of experience [inaudible 00:10:18].

Rob Sand:
So I try to be direct with people. I try to be forthright with people. And I also always want to be transparent and try to be fully inclusive with people. You know, you can’t always name every detail all the time, but the big ones are important. And I think those big ones, when you speak to people that way, it tends to build trust. And I think trust, at the end of the day, is incredibly important to making sure our system of governance works.

Steve Sonnier:
And that’s an excellent point to highlight within there, is the idea of trust and building that up for folks. Because especially in these tenuous times, you do really want to be emphasizing this cornerstone of the foundation, right? It’s an idea of respect and making sure that the point is communicated across. And within this kind of nutshell of things, what do you think is the most pressing issue in your work at this time that folks should be aware of or are considerate of?

Rob Sand:
Well, I mean, there’s no doubt that everything that we are working on right now that we are most concerned about is pandemic-related. If you think about it, there’s an easy argument to be made to say that, given the incredible increase in government activity, one of the most increased workloads is going to fall on oversight entities. Because not only do we need to be looking at the Department of Public Health and how they’re doing their job and making sure that there’s oversight there, but also we’re seeing a lot of relief funds being spent; billions of dollars. And it’s our job too, to be looking at those financial transactions, making sure that that money is being spent responsibly and that it’s being taken good care of. So really, every aspect of the pandemic, at the end of the day, or at least most of them, fall under our purview and it’s certainly all very pressing.

Steve Sonnier:
And especially when you’re talking about the beginning, the whole recent derecho disaster that swept through Iowa, are there prominent areas of concern when we’re talking about disaster relief funds and oversight within this, that the Office of the State Auditor is typically involved in, especially when it comes to disaster relief efforts and the bevy of activity going on right now?

Rob Sand:
This is probably the biggest natural disaster that Iowa has seen in quite some time. And so the use of those disaster funds, where they go, what they’re going there for and why they’re going there, are all important questions that, at some point or another, are going to need to get answered. And so, the role that our office will have in that is about the same that it might have in any other natural disaster.

Rob Sand:
One of the things that I think is important for people to remember in that is that they can be involved in this too. Anybody can be helpful. You and I were out there with chainsaws. There were a lot of people out there who maybe didn’t know how to chainsaw, who were hauling the brush away that we were cutting. There were other people out there who maybe couldn’t haul brush away or didn’t want to, but they were providing us, I think, Sunday night was a dinner of pork sandwiches and corn. Saturday night, I’m trying to think of what I was able to get for dinner on Saturday night. And as I’m thinking about it, actually, I didn’t eat anything on Saturday night for dinner. But there was a lunch on Sunday that we got too. And the point of the matter is everybody can be involved here.

Rob Sand:
Our world is very big and there is a great deal of work to be done. So it’s not enough to say that government is going to do everything, it’s not. And it shouldn’t. But it’s also not enough to say that there’s no role for government and that we don’t all have a shared interest in making sure that issues are addressed. But at the end of the day, we can’t just sit back and assume and expect the government to do everything, nor should we. It’s important for us, it’s important for our virtues, for our morals, for our ethics, for us to get up and get off of our couches and go help people who are in need, especially after a disaster like this.

Steve Sonnier:
What are some of the biggest ways that you think that local Iowans, and then others abroad too who are hearing about this, can help our community to recover from this situation, beyond just pressing for governmental assistance?

Rob Sand:
Showing up on the ground. The number of people who were really happy to see us there, it just makes you feel good because you have made them feel good. The relief on their face of seeing a total stranger show up and start clearing the way to their garage, the kindness that they appreciate when they offer to pay you or give you gas for the chainsaw, and you tell them, “That’s not why I’m here.” These people are in the middle of an incredibly difficult time in their lives. A lot of them have seen their cars crushed, their houses destroyed. They’ve lost electricity. Simply being present to remind them that other people care about them and that we all want to see them do well, or do better and recover, I think actually psychologically, for them, can really be a good boost. And if you can’t be there in person, then you can support the people who are. United Way of East Central Iowa is very busy there. There’s other nonprofits in the Cedar Rapids area that are busy, and there’s small towns all around Iowa that need help as well.

Rob Sand:
And you can always, if nothing else, if you hear about a town that’s been hit, pull up their website and give a call to whatever phone numbers you might find for the mayor, the city council, and just say, “Hey, I want to help. I’m happy to contribute funds. Just please call me back and let me know where to send stuff.” This storm has had such massive destruction that it has been hard for local entities to recover, and to even have that level of organization where they can point people in the right way, but they are getting there. And whether that relief comes from someone next door, or maybe someone in another country, they’re still happy to have it. And the sooner the better.

Steve Sonnier:
Because it was completely overwhelming driving into Cedar Rapids on that past Saturday and Sunday and seeing what exactly is going on there and how many folks do need our assistance. And so I really do want to commend you and others who have been boots-on-the-ground in this situation, but also our photojournalists and our newspaper reporters and everyone in that side of things; they’ve been really fantastic at shining light on something that really deserves national attention and national assistance. And so I do want to thank you for helping out our community in Cedar Rapids and abroad too. Because it’s not just those cities, but there’s also, like you said, smaller cities that do need our assistance, our attention, and that positive psychology of seeing faces there who are ready to help.

Steve Sonnier:
And one thing I do want to touch on before we go here is, you’ve had this fantastic career so far and we’re excited to see where it continues on for you, but along the way, one of the questions we always ask folks is, what’s one thing that you thought you knew, but were later wrong about, across the span of your career or across the span of your life?

Rob Sand:
Sure. I think that’s a great question to ask, because in my new, I guess you’d say, line of work, if that’s what you call it, an elected office, when you find people who can’t answer that, it’s either because they’re not being honest with you or they don’t reflect enough on their own actions. Or they aren’t concerned enough with the truth.

Rob Sand:
Certainly, I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I hear about a lot of them, of course, from my family on a daily basis, whether it’s my wife or our kids. But one of the things in my professional career that I thought I knew, that I ended up being wrong about, was a case related to the Iowa Film Office. And I want to talk about it, and I always talk about it because it emphasizes, I think, that the pursuit of truth really should be, at the end of the day, what pushes our decision-making.

Rob Sand:
We had a guy who was a filmmaker from California, who came out here and made a movie in Iowa, whose records looked, to be frank, very fraudulent. Nothing went where it said it was going to go. And it seemed that there were costs that just didn’t seem to exist. And when we called him up and said, “Hey, can you explain this to us? We’re looking at this. This is the Attorney General’s office and we have a lot of unanswered questions.” He had a very curt and short reply. This was an issue that I addressed with my superiors, but at the end of the day, I was the one making the decisions on this kid. I was at a point where I said, “Look, this is fraud. And we can prove it in court.” I feel confident in this case, and so we indicted him.

Rob Sand:
After we indicted him, he did something incredibly unusual. Without an attorney by his side, he came to Iowa from California, sat down with me for two or three days to walk me through stuff, brought a lot of additional documentation. And then I spent another two or three days walking through everything that he had brought me, verifying it with third parties. And at the end of that whole week that I spent full time working on that one case, I became convinced that I was wrong. Now, being convinced that you are wrong is going to happen to all of us if we’re paying attention, but the other thing that we have to be doing in addition to paying attention is being honest and trying to pursue the truth and not trying to simply protect ourselves or protect our ego or protect some image of the idea that there’s anyone out there that gets it right 100% of the time.

Rob Sand:
And when I reached that point where I realized that this individual was certainly nobody’s idea of a good bookkeeper, was in fact very sloppy and may have been fast and loose on a couple of things, but not in a criminal sense, I dropped the charges. A lot of prosecutors in that position will just basically force somebody to plead to a lesser charge, to save face on their end, to say, “Ha, ha, you pled guilty.” And it just didn’t seem like the right thing to do in that case. The right thing to do seemed to me to simply drop the charges. And so that’s what I did. I don’t know that I could have done anything differently in there. He had the documentation that we needed in order to essentially exonerate him. I think the decision that we made at the time we made it to charge him with the information we had was a fair decision.

Rob Sand:
But at the end of the day, when you get that new information, you’ve got to be willing to actually incorporate it into your assessment and change what you’re doing based on the fuller truth that you now see.

Steve Sonnier:
So science works in general too. That the art of it is once I get new data, then I can make my different decision. And I have to be willing and flexible and humble to put aside my ego, to put aside my personal views, which can be incredibly hard to do. I really want to thank you for that wonderful insight, Rob. And especially too for coming on today and chatting with us. It’s been an excellent opportunity to know you better, and then also to hear more about your work and what your office is doing. So I want to thank you for your time today and for coming on the show and for talking with us further.

Rob Sand:
Yeah, Steve, agreed. Fun to get to know you a little bit better too, and happy to be here. And thanks for the invitation.

Steve Sonnier:
Thanks for tuning into our episode this week. You can find us on Facebook at the University of Iowa College of Public Health. We’re on iTunes and Spotify as well. Thank you to our guest, Rob Sand.

Steve Sonnier:
This episode of From the Front Row was hosted, written and produced by Steve Sonnier. You can reach our team At cph-gradambassador@uiowa.edu. This podcast is brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. Thanks for tuning in. Feel free to share this episode with your colleagues and stay safe out there.