The Iowa Senate passed its final version of the bill Wednesday night in a 33-16 vote, a week after the Iowa House passed it in a 55-41 vote, with six Republicans joining Democrats in opposition. The bill now heads to the desk of Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) to be signed into law.
The bill would prohibit the state auditor from accessing a wide variety of records like individual income tax returns, law enforcement agencies’ criminal files, student records, hospital records and peace officers’ investigative reports — unless the agency being audited “agrees that the information is necessary for the purposes of the audit.”
The bill also would set up a three-person arbitration board in the case of any disputes about whether a state agency should provide documents to the auditor’s office. The arbitration board would be made up of one member each from the state agency in question, the auditor’s office and the governor’s office.
Iowa state auditor Rob Sand said that system effectively would give state agencies a two-vote veto power over any records they didn’t want to provide, since the governor’s office is responsible for what happens at the state agencies.
“Everybody in the state understands this. It’s not complicated,” Sand said at a news conference last Thursday, after the House passed its version of the bill. “If you let a state agency decide what the auditor’s office can look at, how often are they going to let [the auditor] find waste, fraud and abuse?”
Republican state lawmakers have argued that the bill is necessary to protect the personal information of Iowa residents, and is a response to privacy concerns arising from a 2021 lawsuit in which the Iowa Supreme Court ruled the state auditor’s office could subpoena the University of Iowa for information related to a utilities deal.
“We in no way, in my opinion, are leaving fraud unattended,” Iowa state Rep. Michael Bergen (R) said.
Sand has pushed back on that reasoning, arguing that Iowa law and standard auditing practices already dictate that auditors in his office must abide by confidentiality practices. His office has never had a privacy violation, he added, and no one approached him in the two years since the 2021 lawsuit to express privacy concerns.
“Some joker in here wants to convince everybody that this somehow doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that I’m the only statewide elected Democrat,” said Sand, who was first elected to the office in 2018 and won reelection in November to a second term. “I don’t think there’s a single Iowan who doesn’t see through that.”
Sand also warned that $12 billion in federal funding to Iowa could be at risk if state auditors do not comply with the federal Government Accountability Office’s auditing standards, according to an analysis by Iowa’s nonpartisan legislative services agency.
In a letter opposing the legislation, former U.S. comptroller general David Walker — who served under Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton — said the bill “would effectively undercut the independence of, and nonpartisan approach needed for the Iowa state auditor’s office to be fully effective.”
Republicans hold a supermajority in the Iowa state legislature, and have this session passed bills to restrict access to federal food assistance and to roll back child labor protections.
Iowa House Speaker Pat Grassley — the grandson of the state’s long-serving Republican U.S. Sen. Charles E. Grassley — recently defended a spate of bills targeting the LGBTQ community, saying Iowa lawmakers were acting with “common sense.”
“We laid out in session very early on some of these bills being part of our priority list,” Grassley said last month. “A lot of the bills we are working on, we’re taking concerns from Iowans across the state and trying to figure out how we have best policies.”
Annie Gowen contributed to this report.
