Timothy O’Brien, who has served Denver Auditor since 2015, stands out from his predecessors because he is a certified accountant, a chartered financial analyst and a chartered global management accountant. He also served as the Colorado state auditor for nearly dozen years.  

That innate knowledge of accounting and experience come handy, he told Colorado Politics. 

O’Brien also talked about innovations his office is pursuing and city council’s resistance to his authority to audit them.

Colorado Politics: I don’t think a lot of kids will say, ‘I want to be an auditor when I grow up.’ How did you become one? What was your journey like?

Timothy O’Brien: You mean to be the Denver Auditor? That’s a long story, but, you know, in college I was a physics major. I realized one Saturday afternoon in the physics lab that it was nice day outside and I didn’t want to be a physics major, testing the torque on the spring when everybody was outside playing baseball and having a good time. I had taken some business classes the first part of college, like economics, which I really enjoyed, and from there I got into accounting and it only seems logical for me to take the CPA exam. And it’s been fun ever since. I mean I really think I picked the right profession.

CP: What would be your advice to young people who might be looking at you and then saying maybe I ought to consider going into accounting and more specifically going into auditing?

O’Brien: Well, I think I would suggest that they should at least take a look. They should talk to people that are in accounting. That might not be their first desire but I think it’s something worth at least looking at.

CP: And how many enemies do you make a year?

O’Brien: Oh, gosh! That’s a big number. I don’t know that we make a lot of enemies. I mean nobody likes being audited. They tend to identify it with being audited by the Internal Revenue Service. I don’t think we’re doing those kinds of audits. But audits, you know, [it’s] like going to the dentist. The dentist tells you about the teeth that aren’t working right, and audits tell organizations about the parts of the organization that isn’t working right also.

CP: In one of the press releases, you mentioned audit analytics. What is that exactly and how does it improve auditing?

O’Brien: Well, what we do is we take large piles of data – you know, hundreds of thousands of transactions … Really, it’s the ability for us to look for the needle in the haystack. So, if we’re looking at purchasing card transactions, which we look at regularly, if we have a lot of things that fall outside our normal range, we might say to somebody, ‘Let’s take a closer look at this in an audit’ or we might say, ‘We’re not going to bother to take a look at it’ because, you know, things look pretty good. We have had some examples of that where we looked at contracts. Any contract that is over $500,000 – with the exception of our airport – has to be approved by the city council. We were finding, by using our data analytics, contracts that were under $500,000, but, if you added them together, like they should have been, they exceeded $500,000. So, they were kind of splitting the contracts, which is usurping the authority of the city council to approve those things.

We did conduct a review of that and informed the city council about it, and we still look at that periodically and we don’t find that pattern of activity going on.

CP: So, the contractors were looking at the council’s oversight [authority] and saying we can get around that oversight if we split the contract?

O’Brien: We had contracts for $499,999.99, and you see a handful of those and you say, ‘Something is wrong.’

CP: If that’s not skirting the city council’s oversight authority, I don’t know what is. I mean it seems pretty blatant.

O’Brien: It was pretty blatant. This goes back four or five years but I think that’s an example of the data analytics – how we can look at large amounts of data and not expend an enormous amount of staff time.

CP: What has been the most difficult audit, you think, that you’ve done?

O’Brien: The one that I haven’t completed yet. It kind of goes back to your earlier question about differences between the state auditor and the Denver Auditor. The state departments and agencies rarely would challenge the auditor’s authority. Since I’ve taken office [in Denver], I mean, I’ve had a lot of agencies challenge the auditor’s authority to conduct an audit. The [Denver] Zoo challenged the auditor’s authority. Department of Human Services challenges the auditor’s authority. It is so crystal clear to me and the city charter that the auditor has the authority. The county court challenged our authority, and right now the city council is challenging my authority. So, that’s a big difference, and, obviously, those are difficult audits to conduct if you can’t get access to information.

CP: The resistance that you’re encountering – you mentioned a couple of them, notably the city council – where do you think that’s coming from? Why is there resistance on the part of the city council?

O’Brien: I think it would be best answered by a member of the city council because I’ve talked to a number of members of the council and said we’d like to have an audit. Yet, they are not cooperating. And it kind of gets to what are called generally accepted government audit standards. That’s in the city charter. That’s where the city charter says this is how you will conduct audits. And there are a couple members of the city council that don’t agree with the way that we want to conduct our audits. I think that’s a violation of the charter on their part. They can tell the auditor what to audit. They can’t tell the auditor how to audit. The people have already told the auditor how to audit and that’s in accordance with generally accepted government audit standards.

CP: I’m just wondering if they’ve given you what their best argument is for resisting your authority.

O’Brien: Well, if they’ve given me their best argument, it’s not very good. They want me to conduct an audit a certain way and I don’t conduct audits that way.

CP: What happens if you acquiesce and you say, ‘Alright, we’ll conduct the audit your way.’ What does that bode for your office?

O’Brien: I think that’s the slippery slope that we don’t want to get [on].

CP: If you could persuade them right now … what would you tell the city council?

O’Brien: Well, the city council, I would tell them to cooperate with the audit. I mean we’re not going to be looking at the legislative process that they go through, but we’re really looking at the operations of the council, how resources are allocated to the various council districts, etc. You know, other organizations, like the zoo and the county court, I mean they eventually came around and we did conduct the audits. So why the council is resisting is a question to ask the council. There will be new leadership and the council and we will reengage the conversation when that new leadership takes over.

CP: You don’t feel like you could reengage in that discussion and have a fruitful resolution at this point?

O’Brien: I think we’ve had the discussion enough, a number of times, and yes, isn’t that Einstein’s theory of insanity: Doing the same thing over and expecting different results?