Thanks Sharon Erickson for speaking up. This looks as suspicious as it can be, from the seemingly pre-arranged vote (Brown Act violation?), to Scharff's glib "the only way you really figure it out is to do it." Hey, here's an idea - try cutting 2 position and having a combination of inside and outside resource; that's how you can find out what works. Once you cut all the positions, it will never come back.

Internal audit is a vital function. The City Council is supposed to manage the City Manager - but at the same time, they rely on him or her for 100% of their information about how operations work. This is fraught with conflict. Internal audit is one of the key checks on this problem. The effectiveness of internal audit depends on knowledge of the operations - outside consultants can often be easily fooled by managers who control the information.

Interesting gut check for the whole council - they need to stand up to this false economy.

There's so much wasteful spending in PA. This is certainly a false economy, esp with the huge unfunded pension liabilities and constantly rising utility rates.

Is this just a way for the CC to avoid accountability?

I was also shocked to hear of the proposal to eliminate the entire staff and contract it out. Absolutely the wrong thing to do! During my eight years on the city council, I looked to the city auditor and her staff as key advisors and analysts directly reporting to the city council in helping us oversee an efficient, effective and responsive city government.
Sharon Erickson was a world-class auditor, indeed earning a well deserved reputation as a tough but fair auditor. City auditors are a small group of people. Farming out the audits to outside firms means we lose the opportunity to train the next generation of Sharon Ericksons to come up the ranks.

Yoriko Kishimoto, former Mayor

"Opinion: Eliminating audit staff is a bad idea"

Fact: Eliminating audit staff is an excellent idea if you don't want objective professional oversight of the city government. The real question is, WHY certain Palo Alto government officials don't want objective professional oversight of the city government.

This is merely the latest capricious power play by Greg Scharff. He continues a long pattern of lack of respect for real public process and deliberation on important issues, instead substituting his grossly inflated self certainty.

Well said and thank you Sharon Erickson! One only need read these words to understand how the current auditing function is failing our city.

If the council was serious about effective and independent auditing, they would do everything in their power to recruit Ms. Erickson to return to Palo Alto.

Our city is far poorer, and not only in financial terms, since Ms. Erickson departed for San Jose. We need a strong injection of ethical leadership and we need it now!

Hear, Hear.
Based upon well over a decade of dealing with City Staff and consultants, I would like to re-iterate our former City Auditor's major points:

1. Loss of institutional knowledge. Having the citizenry inject this into the process is both difficult and often unsuccessful. Having it come from elsewhere in City Staff can be similarly unsuccessful because of turnover there reduces institutional knowledge.

2. Poor quality work by consultants: This is arises from the business dynamics of consulting. It is more profitable to simply apply templates and dogma. Dealing with facts-on-the-ground is doubly expensive: (1) having to acquire that information, and (2) incorporating it into the templates.

3. Low value work by consultants: Although consulting firms routinely advertise their expertise to get the contract, the actual work is often done by very junior employees who are poorly supervised. Much of what you are paying for is those junior employees learning how to do their job, that is, you are being used as a "case study" in their post-graduate education.

I am so sure effectiveness will go up once Ms. Richardson is overseeing external contractors from her home in Washington. And that sure sounds like a role that should continue to cost us taxpayers (all-in) close to $300k a year. </sarcasm>

Yes, the productivity has been abysmal. Cleaning house makes sense, but it clearly needs to include the top.

There's a guy (whose name I forget) who is a retired government auditor that has served as an interim for us here in Palo Alto as well as down in San Jose... let's get him in to oversee our new contracting approach for a short while we patiently rebuild with A+ personnel (including the head) as we can find them.