COLUMBUS — State Auditor Keith Faber's ads tout 93 individuals that he says have been successfully prosecuted at least in part because of red flags his office has discovered during his nearly four years in office.

He's predicting a record number of such cases if voters give him another four on Nov. 8.

“I'm very proud of the fact that we have held public officials accountable for lying, stealing, and cheating,” the Celina attorney and former Ohio Senate president said. “I'm proud of the fact that we have more convictions and are on pace to set a blistering record of the number of people we've held accountable.

“The fact is we've found tens of millions of dollars in findings for recovery,” he said. “We've found hundreds of millions of dollars of inappropriate spending and billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse in Ohio programs. They're all records.”

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But it's one investigation that his office did not do that his Democratic opponent, Nelsonville City Auditor Taylor Sappington, highlights. He says the auditor should have seen signs of the $61 million bribery scandal involving fellow Republicans at the Ohio Statehouse before federal investigators did and that there's nothing preventing him from looking into it now.

Former House Speaker Larry Householder faces trial in January on a federal racketeering charge in connection a scheme that had the end goal of enacting a $1 billion consumer-financed bailout of two nuclear power plants then owned by a FirstEnergy subsidiary.

Mr. Faber said the FBI has a history of asking other government agencies to step down for fear their investigations might interfere with their own. It did so earlier this year when the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio was looking into its own alleged role in the scandal.

“I don't have any jurisdiction over private companies like FirstEnergy,” Mr. Faber said. “The secretary of state has exclusive campaign finance jurisdiction, and the Joint Legislative Ethics Commission has jurisdiction over legislative ethics issues, which would include bribery.”

Mr. Faber, 56, served 18 years in the General Assembly, eight in the Senate and 10 in the House of Representatives — before being elected to be the state's top bookkeeper as part of a Republican wave in 2018. 

Neither he nor his opponent is an accountant.

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“As a lawyer, I've handled complex financial cases,” Mr. Faber said. “I've handled cases involving forensics auditing...There's an argument that a lot of what you do in the state auditor's office is legal...We don't balance anybody's books. We do catch a lot of crooks.”

In addition to conducting or overseeing audits of state and local government entities, the state auditor conducts performance audits to help identify efficiencies as well as special audits like one his office is currently doing of the State Teachers Retirement System, the results of which could be seen in December.

STRS has been criticized by some retirees angered by the loss of their cost-of-living adjustments for several years and the subsequent decision by the board to give performance bonuses to internal investment staff despite huge investment losses.

“We had enough concerns that came forward from members and then we saw enough red flags come up during our audit to take a deeper look at it,” Mr. Faber said. “We wanted to have an independent actuarial perspective to take a look at it.”

The auditor said the audit will not second guess investment decisions or decide whether the bonuses were deserved.

“We will answer whether they paid bonuses according to their policy...,” he said. “They have the discretion to set their bonus policy, but we will make note as to whether that policy is consistent with other industry practices and whether their benchmarks are benchmarks that are widely accepted.”

The auditor was among the earliest to question the level of fraud seen in the state's unemployment compensation system during the height of the coronavirus pandemic when the state was under pressure to get enhanced federal benefits out as quickly as possible.

He was frustrated by what he said weren’t straight answers at the time.

“When you have a multi-billion-dollar payment system and you take down the controls on it, you should anticipate that you're going to have fraud,” Mr. Faber said. “And the fraud that we saw was at a new extreme, but it is consistent with the fraud that you saw all over the country. I will give the Department of Job and Family Services a little bit of breathing room in the fact that they were drinking literally from a fire hose and having a year's worth of claims in a week and that they were being told by the federal government to get money out fast and were worried more about getting the money out than they were about security.

“That, in my opinion, doesn't mean that you ignore the security,” he said. “To have a multi-billion-dollar payment system without basic level controls, in my view, is unconscionable.”

He does not plan, however, to intervene in the larger problem of the shaky long-term solvency of the fund.

“For 18 years, when I was in the legislature, I made public policy,” Mr. Faber said. “As state auditor I audit to the public policy determinations made by others. I don't get to substitute my judgment for that of the legislature or federal government.”

He points to office's recent audit of the state's College Credit Plus program through which students can earn college-level credits while still in high school that put a spotlight on how well school districts were implementing the program.

The office has gotten greater attention than usual recently because the auditor is one of three statewide officeholders on the seven-member Ohio Redistricting Commission. The Republican-majority panel has been locked in high-profile disputes with the Ohio Supreme Court, a bipartisan majority of which has repeatedly struck down GOP-drawn maps as overly partisan.

Mr. Faber stood out in that he voted against the last three sets of state legislative maps passed by his fellow Republicans. But unlike the Democrats who also opposed them, he felt that the final products were an unconstitutional, court-ordered gerrymandering designed to create more Democratic districts.

“Because of the political geography of Ohio, I think it's equally unfair to draw districts where you take Lake County into East Cleveland or you take Ottawa County into East Toledo, because I think that is gerrymandering for an outcome,” he said.

He said he tried to work to broker compromise but found neither the Republican nor Democratic legislative leaders on the panel receptive. While he feared the court could find commissioners in contempt, he doesn’t believe it had the power to do so.

The whole process will start over again next year to create new maps for the 2024 election cycle.

First Published October 23, 2022, 2:00 p.m.