This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

It's a rogue's gallery of government service:

• Members of little known government boards meeting to spend public money without telling the public, including the Utah Dairy Commission holding meetings in Florida and Arizona.

• Board members of the Utah Local Governments Trust, an insurance co-op, spending public money on an overnight Christmas party at the Grand America that rang in at close to $3,500. They also bought San Diego Padres tickets, golf rounds for spouses and iPads so they could read their monthly reports.

• A financial analyst at the Utah Schools for the Deaf and Blind had apparently skimmed $67,000 of public funds over four years, money that otherwise would go to educating deaf and blind children

What do they all have in common? They all came to light in the past 10 days because of the work of the Utah State Auditor's office.

Always needed but often invisible, the auditor's office under State Auditor John Dougall has become an aggressive advocate for exposing hidden and wasteful practices throughout state and local government.

It's an elected statewide office, but generally not a high-profile one, particularly when it is held by auditors who define the role to be largely auditing financial records. Dougall ran on a pledge to broaden the role to include "performance audits" on how well entities were carrying out their jobs. 

And it only took two months in office before he was bumping up against the Utah Retirement Systems. The office's February 2013 performance audit called out the retirement fund for being too optimistic in projections and too opaque in processes. Since then the office has found waste and inefficiency in the large (Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control), the small (Southwest Utah Public Health Department) and everything in between.

And Dougall claimed a victory earlier this year when the Department of Workforce Services exposed a food-stamp fraudster using techniques recommended earlier by the auditor's office.

Dougall called himself a strong advocate of government transparency when he introduced a bill as a state legislator back in 2011, but the claim didn't quite ring true. That was because the bill, fully backed by his leadership in the Legislature, was perhaps the worst open-government legislation in decades. House Bill 477 blew holes in the Government Records Access and Management Act, and, after legislators greased it through, the public responded with protests that forced them to reverse.

Whether HB477 was an anomaly or an awakening, Dougall is backing up his transparency pledge five years later. Utahns all over the state are better for it.