The House plans to vote Wednesday on a suddenly emerging bill that House Speaker Ronald Mariano said could “put an end to protracted litigation” around the voter-approved audit of the Legislature while also establishing a new framework for public access to legislative records.
The House Ways and Means Committee was polling the bill (H 5469) Tuesday morning. At the same time, Mariano’s office circulated statements of support from Common Cause Massachusetts, the ACLU of Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association.
“Tomorrow, the House of Representatives will debate legislation informed by good government experts that will increase access to public records from the executive and legislative branches, and establish a clear framework for legislative audits conducted by the State Auditor. These measures will build on the rules reforms that the Legislature adopted earlier this session, and will ensure greater transparency while respecting legislative privilege and the separation-of-powers principles outlined in the state Constitution,” Mariano, a Quincy Democrat, said. “We hope this legislation will put an end to protracted litigation, address an issue that may otherwise come before voters on the ballot, and allow the Legislature to refocus on the real issues facing Massachusetts residents.”
The Senate voted last week to provide financial information that Auditor Diana DiZoglio has long requested as part of a probe of the Legislature authorized under a 2024 law. At the time, Mariano said the House would take a different route to respond to the Supreme Judicial Court’s order allowing DiZoglio to proceed, mentioning ongoing work with unnamed “transparency experts.”
Mariano said in a letter to representatives Thursday that after “extensive conversations with the Senate about this issue over the past few weeks,” House leader concluded that a resolution, the approach taken by the Senate last week, “would not be the appropriate method of affirming our legislative prerogative as a coequal branch of government -- nor would it allow us to address future inquiries or resolve the endless legal disputes that have come to define the audit ballot question.”
The bill on the docket for Wednesday “amends the State Auditor’s chapter 11 authority to audit the General Court by defining the scope of that authority in a newly created section,” a summary from the speaker’s office said.
The new section would authorize the auditor to scrub administrative functions of the Legislature, which the bill limits to four specific categories: the adoption of the official budget of either branch or joint legislative operations, the commissioning and receipt of any official audit of either branch or of joint legislative operations, the expenditure of funds appropriated to either branch or for joint legislative operations, and the execution of any monetary settlement agreements entered into by either branch with a member, officer or employee. In all cases, the auditor would only be able to go back as far as fiscal year 2021, the year Mariano became House speaker and the first year from which DiZoglio has requested documents.
The House bill also appears to try to remove the courts from being able to officiate any disputes between the auditor and the Legislature. It declares, “No court shall have jurisdiction to compel the production of records, to enforce any interview request or to adjudicate any dispute arising under an audit conducted pursuant to this section.” It states that the auditor’s “exclusive remedy available with respect to any dispute” is to, essentially, write about it in the audit report.
The 2024 audit law states that the auditor “shall audit the accounts, programs, activities and functions directly related to” the Legislature and further states that the auditor’s office “shall have access to such accounts at reasonable times and the department may require the production of books, documents, vouchers and other records relating to any matter within the scope of an audit conducted under this section or section 13, except tax returns.”
Massachusetts is one of only a small handful of states that exempts the governor’s office and Legislature from the public records law, though an advancing ballot proposal would apply it to both.
The House bill would not apply the existing public records law to the Legislature, but instead would create a Legislature-run system through which people could request documents from 17 specific categories that would be defined as “legislative records.” Those records would include legislation, resolutions, summaries, fiscal notes, amendments, committee votes, the results of committee electronic polls, finalized leadership assignments, financial records provided to the comptroller, written disclosures from members under Chapter 268A, and more.
The regular public records law, though, would be applied to the governor’s office. But only for records created on or after Jan. 7, 2027 — the start of the next gubernatorial term.
Asked on Tuesday morning about the transparency legislation, House Ways and Means Chair Aaron Michlewitz said, “We’ll have plenty of time to explain that later today.”
