Florida Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia said he has heard from “multiple sources” “who work inside local governments” that local officials have deleted or altered information in advance of state audits.
Ingoglia said he was “not at liberty to say” which city or county governments the allegations target.
Those governments, Ingoglia claims, have held “some meetings with the sole purpose of scrubbing the information from public record as we start looking for some of the things that are outlined in our DOGE letters.”
Ingoglia said the scrubbed information could include “certain keywords” from documents, which would make it more difficult for auditors to search electronic records.
“Depending on what we find, we will let everyone know,” Ingoglia said Thursday morning outside Jacksonville City Hall, responding to questions about which areas the allegations encompass. “We will let people know once we find the information.”
Ingoglia said the auditors often decide their targets after people inside local governments or in government-adjacent organizations “are telling us, ‘Hey, you should look at X, Y, and Z because A, B, and C is happening.’”
“This is a warning to any local government that tries to hide the spending, try to scrub the information from government servers, that we will subpoena you and we will make sure that we get the information,” Ingoglia said.
“In addition, if we have enough information, we are going to send in the digital forensics team from FDLE and find out who is scrubbing the information and then we may refer that over for criminal investigation.”
The Florida Department of Government Efficiency audits are modeled on the federal model first led by billionaire Elon Musk shortly after President Donald Trump began his second term.
Other DOGE audits have commenced in St. Petersburg, Broward County, Gainesville, Miami-Dade County, Manatee County, Pinellas County, HIllsborough County, Orange County, and the State University System.
“We have heard allegations of this from numerous sources, enough where it concerns us in the CFO’s office and the DOGE team for us to investigate it,” Ingoglia said.
Earlier this week, Ingoglia announced a partial rebranding of the state investigative body as the Florida Agency for Fiscal Oversight. That creates an acronym, FAFO, that Ingoglia was shy to share on camera before eventually sharing a more family-friendly version:
“Fool around and find out. If you’re going to go and you’re going to be a local government and you’re going to cover things up and try to make it harder for our investigators to find things that they shouldn’t be hiding, they’re going to see the FO part of that,” Ingoglia said.
‘Red tape’
Ingoglia, in Jacksonville, made clear the state has no interest in “anyone putting bureaucratic red tape in front of us.”
This week, Ingoglia and Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan had a public back-and-forth, disagreeing about how the state officials would access Jacksonville’s financial records.
“We are not going to sign a form. They’re getting the information right now. Our audits and review are not a suggestion. It’s outlined by law. There is no negotiation when we come in and we try to protect taxpayers rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse,” Ingoglia said.
The state requested information from Miami-Dade County, giving officials there about nine days to send the material.
Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava asked Ingoglia for a 30-day extension to submit documents. Ingoglia did not grant the extension.
“There is ZERO reason Miami-Dade can’t do the same,” Ingoglia wrote on social media.