Legislative Audit Bureau access to documents maintained by state agencies and authorizing the Government Accountability Board to provide investigatory records to the Legislative Audit Bureau

What it does

Summary by the Legislative Reference Bureau, the Legislature's nonpartisan drafting office. It's their wording, not ours.

The Legislative Audit Bureau (LAB) currently has access, at any time and without notice, to all state agencies and to any of their documents that relate to agency expenditures, revenues, operations, and structure. State agencies, in this regard, include not only executive branch agencies, but also legislative and judicial branch bodies, numerous quasi-public entities, and entities that receive more than 50 percent of their funding from state funds.

On July 10, 2014, the attorney general issued an opinion (OAG-03-14) that the Government Accountability Board (GAB) could not provide certain investigative records to LAB. These records could only be released if specifically authorized by law and the attorney general concluded that the LAB's general authority to have access to state agency documents was insufficiently specific and thus was not a specific authorization. In particular, the attorney general found that current law did not "grant LAB the general right to obtain documents made confidential by other statutory sections."

Who's behind it

The official record doesn't name its authors.