Orange County Supervisors are hiring an auditor to come in and review the last five years of contracts in some of their most high profile departments after a former colleague pleaded guilty to bribery in October. 

County leaders have been facing calls for months to step up their auditing after a federal investigation found former Supervisor Andrew Do directed over $10 million to contractors in exchange for kickbacks. 

[Read: Former OC Supervisor Andrew Do Pleads Guilty to Bribery Scheme]

It marks the second time a public agency in Orange County has authorized an independent review of itself in the last couple years after Anaheim City Council members hired investigators to probe city hall in the wake of an FBI corruption probe that saw the collapse of the Angel Stadium land sale and the former mayor plead guilty to a series of federal crimes.

While supervisors already authorized an internal review for some of their pandemic-era contracts in September, the outside auditor is slated to take a broader look once they are selected by Aggie Alonso, the director of the county’s internal audit department.  

The outside auditor is expected to review every contract from Jan. 2019 to Jan. 2024 that was handled by the county CEO’s office, along with the county Social Services Agency, Orange County Community Resources and the county Health Care Agency. 

Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento, who proposed the audit, originally asked for every contract in the past five years to be reviewed for impropriety. 

“I wanted to be much broader,” Sarmiento said at the board’s Tuesday morning meeting. “I want to make sure we do a thorough scrubbing of everything.” 

But Sarmiento’s colleagues said that a review of every contract would be too expensive and too time consuming, voting instead to narrow the scope of the investigation in a 3-1 vote that Sarmiento went along with. 

“I think what we’re quibbling about is not whether or not this is important to do, but what direction are specifically given to staff so they can actually accomplish the task that is intended?” said Supervisor Katrina Foley. 

Supervisor Don Wagner was the lone dissenting vote, who’d previously said he wouldn’t support an outside audit and raised concerns over how much the audit could cost. 

“Instead of focusing we’ve gone even broader,” Wagner said Tuesday. “This request goes in the other direction, I think, of what we were trying to do last time.” 

Anaheim’s Independent Probe 

Last year, Anaheim officials raised similar concerns about the broadness of the scope of their own city commissioned independent corruption probe after investigators said they need more money to finish their investigation.

[Read: Pulling Back the Curtain: What Exactly Are Investigators Looking at in The Anaheim Corruption Probe?]

But Clay Smith, a retired superior court judge overseeing Anaheim’s probe, and the investigators refused to scale down the scope of the investigation despite officials demanding them to do so.

“I am deeply concerned that if the City now requires a narrowing of the investigation’s focus it will no longer be seen by the public as truly ‘independent.’ It would be seen as an investigation guided or limited by the City,” Smith wrote to council members at the time.

“Most significantly, it is not what was promised to the citizens of Anaheim.”

In the end, officials moved forward with additional funding for the probe without changes to the scope following a series of stories by the Voice of OC and pushback from residents.

The result was an over 350-page report that led Anaheim officials to move forward with a series of reform proposals spanning from late last year into this year. 

On Tuesday, OC Supervisors noted this audit could be a first round, and that if auditors found more problematic contracts they might come back and do more reviews later. 

“I think it’s important we focus the priority so we’re not off on a tangent somewhere unnecessarily, that we focus the first phase,” Foley said. “I want to get it done in a relatively reasonable period of time so it’s not 2-3 years down the road.”

While it’s unclear what the final costs could be, internal auditor Aggie Alonso said that $1 million would likely be less than the final costs. 

In addition to the audit, supervisors unanimously agreed to move forward with a review of the county’s fraud hotline and to study expanding the power of the county’s code of ethics without any discussion. 

Noah Biesiada is a Voice of OC reporter and corps member with Report for America, a GroundTruth initiative. Contact him at nbiesiada@voiceofoc.org.