FM Talk 1065 Podcasts
State Auditor Andrew Sorrell - Jeff Poor Show - Thursday 6-27-24
(upbeat rock music) ♪ A couple guys in first class on a flight ♪ ♪ From New York to Los Angeles ♪ - Welcome back to the Jet Force Show. If you talk about 6'5" they just stayin' with us on this Thursday morning, 2-5-1-3-4-3-0-1-0-6, text me. I'm still waiting for somebody to convince me that we need Amtrak and mobile again. And if you can, I mean, maybe there's a case to be made, but so far the only like really like pro-passager rail people have been like, oh, it'd be just be nice to have. That's not really gonna, I don't think cut it when it comes to using government resources to have something, you need a little more there, but I'm not making that decision. I am just a dumbass with a microphone. Anyway, joining us now, somebody's not a dumbass. Always a pleasure to bring on my next guest. He is our state auditor, Andrew Sorrell is with us. Andrew, good morning, how are you? - That was quite the introduction there, Jeff. I'm doing pretty well. Thanks for having me on. - Well, before we get into what I wanted to ask you to come on about, how's the job going? It's always good to catch up with you and I kind of get you to fill in the auditor role in this state. - Jobs going well, this week's been a little bit tougher than normal because we've got my chief of staff and one other kind of key employee. They're both out on vacations this week, but they deserve their time off and I was glad for them to take it. So other than the rest of us picking up maybe a little bit of the slack, everything's going great. One update on that bill that, you know, I got my bill out of the house and Senate committees this year got it to the Senate floor and it got carried over to the call chair. This is the bill of course, it would expand the state auditor's duties. There was a little bit of resistance in the house. What's it made it out of committee? There was some resistance to getting it to the floor and I actually was able to go have lunch with rules chairman Joe Lovern about two weeks ago over in Auburn. He treated me, nice lunch there. We had a good time, a long discussion stopped in and saw Senator Jay Hovey there as well, downtown Auburn, but nonetheless, one of the things that Joe Lovern I expressed was that he had said there might have been some concern about the investigations division that was being created in the state auditor's office. Some of the legislators were concerned about that. What is this investigation? Is the vision going to be investigating? And my response was those people probably didn't read the bill because if they read the bill, they wouldn't have been concerned. The investigations division was only going to investigate loss or theft or misuse of state property. That's all it did. So I think people were fearing it was much more comprehensive investigations division being created. Maybe something that like some law enforcement agency would be doing and I said, that's not it at all. So on his recommendation, I have reworked the bill. We are renaming that. It's not going to be the property investigation division to hopefully dispel any confusion about what that new investigation division is actually going to do. So with minor changes like that, it was not a substantive change at all. It was just kind of more a technical change, but I think it'll help clear up confusion with the legislators. And so anyway, I'm more optimistic than ever that I can get that bill to the floor in the House and Senate next year. - Tell me about that property investigation division. Like what kind of authority does it have? How, I mean, can it get to demand things or compel agencies to do things? And then what's you completed investigation? What purposes that investigation does finding serve? - Yeah, good question. Let me start with a story of why we need a property investigations division. We had a Department of Public Health employee about two months ago who went to State Surplus. And his job was to take a box truck there and drop off Surplus inventory that was going to be auctioned off. Is what we do with all state property that is of a certain value, certain threshold, has to go to Surplus and be auctioned off. And Surplus is run through a DECA, okay? So the guy pulls up and instead of waiting for help to unload the box truck, I didn't have a lift gate. So he would have had to had assistance unloading this heavy stuff. He just proceeds to throw it off the back of the truck on the concrete floor and break it all. And he denied doing it. And unfortunately for him, it was all caught on video. And I've seen the video. I requested it and they sent it. And Surplus has said this guy has never allowed back. When that's how bad this was. And it was over $20,000 of equipment. Now the depreciated value of the equipment, if you'd appreciated a 10% a year, depreciated value was more in the $5,000 or less range. But still nobody should be throwing taxpayer property off the back of the truck and breaking. So my question was, how was the form marked? Because when property is lost or damaged, there's a form that has to be filled out by the agency and they either market as negligent or non-negligent. In the past, we've seen agencies always market as non-negligent. Because if the market is non-negligent, they don't have to do anything else with it. And most of the time they don't feel like fiddling with it. But in a case like this, it was clearly negligent. My question was, had they actually marked it negligent? So I got a hold of the form and thankfully yes, they had marked it negligence. Now one of the things my bill would do is allow my office to overrule them. If they had marked that a non-negligent loss, we could overrule them and say, no, that is negligent if this bill passes. So that's the thing number one. But they got at least that portion right. But then I looked down at the corrective action. And the corrective action taken was, told the employee to be more patient. That's all it said. I said, that's not adequate corrective action. It should have said and required employee to repay for the damaged property. So I've been in communication with him the last 60 days. And I have basically said, I'm not letting this go until you make this employee repay the taxpayers for the property that he broke. And last I heard this week they are setting up a payment plan and the taxpayers are actually gonna be getting reimbursed to that property. So this property investigations division is going to investigate scenarios just like what I described. 'Cause this is not isolated. That's just the one I pulled off the top of my head to tell you about. But we got to make sure that taxpayer property is not being carelessly disposed of, stolen, things like that. That's what we're gonna be looking into. Now, as far as what authority would we have to do something if this new bill passes after the investigation's complete, we can issue a demand letter. Now, I don't know about you, but if I'm a state employee and I got a demand letter from the state auditor's office, I'd probably go ahead and send the check in. But if they don't, they would allow me to refer it to the attorney general for further civil action. - So it's not criminal. It's just civil, I mean, I guess if they don't pay it, it hits their credit report. I mean, like what's the consequences here? - Well, I mean, first of all, if the attorney general, again, if the AG sent me a letter saying you owe this day some money, I would just write the check. I wouldn't wait to find out what the consequences are. But yes, we're not trying to pursue people criminally. We're not trying to throw you in jail if you, let's say you left your car unlocked and the state laptop got stolen out of it. I don't think that's criminal. I just think you were careless and the remedy should be you have to pay the state back for the property. I don't think the remedy is you get a criminal action on your background or anything like that. We're not trying to overcorrect here. I just wanna make sure that the people are being, are reimbursing the agencies when they lose or break, carelessly break state property. Now, I've heard stories, a state docs worker bends over and a cell phone falls out of his pocket into the water. Stuff like accidents happen. That's what the investigations are visions for. We're not just going after everybody. I had a state senator I talked to and he got off the airplane and left his state-issued laptop on the airplane totally by accident. My question was, did you try to recover it? Yes, he immediately tried to recover it and he eventually did get it back. So you gotta look at the facts of each situation before you make a determination. And ultimately, my office isn't the one with the ultimate enforcement. It would still be the attorney general. So that should dispel any fears, I think the legislature has, of too much power for the auditor's office. Ultimately, it's still rests with the attorney general, but I could get the ball rolling. 'Cause frankly, the attorney general is out there fighting, for the transgender surgery bill we passed few years ago. He's out there fighting vaccine mandates. Like he's got big things going on. And I don't wanna trouble him with these $5,000 property law cases if we could just handle it internally. - Joy by state auditor Andrew Sorrell here on the program. Reason why I get you on here Andrew, just team baking. We now we had Senator Andrew Jones on a couple of weeks ago to talk about this. And it's kind of stunning to think this happens, but because of the business that you're in makes that your customers can just drop you based on that. That is something that they do just indiscriminately, it seems. Well, I guess it would be discriminatory technically. But talk about that and why this is something that Alabama needs to take action on. - I don't believe that large companies, these large institutions, banks, insurance companies, et cetera, should be able to discriminate against you for your religious or political beliefs. And that's exactly what's happening. So these large vote corporations, they don't believe you have a Second Amendment right, for instance. And if they don't agree with your First Amendment right, a free speech, if you're out there saying something that they don't like, they can just de-bank you. And that's exactly what happened to me, though the connection for me was not First Amendment, it was Second Amendment because I own a gun store, actually I own two gun stores, one in Florence and one in Huntsville, had them for a number of years, had a credit card company we had been with for about six years, paid our bill on time, every time. I mean, we were the model customer for them. One day we get a letter that your account was being closed, no explanation, 30 days, your account's closed. So we had to scramble and we were very confused by it. We had no idea, like we've been late on our payments and stuff I would have understood, but that wasn't the case. We've been a great customer. So we went and we got another credit card. And you know, you know how it is, Jeff, you have all of your auto bill stuff, your internet, your phone payment, all your suppliers, like everything's built, it's annoying to have, it takes many hours to go through the process of changing all that over to another credit card. The next year, our credit card processor drops us. It says, in 30 days, you will no longer be able to take credit cards. And again, major problem, no explanation. Why is this happening to us? So we went to a local bank, we went to First Metro Bank in Florence, and they are not woke. And they were happy to have our business and we set up credit card processing with them, albeit at a slightly higher percentage rate than what we had been paying this other company. The third year comes around and our insurance company drops us. And I'm like, what is happening? I was mad by this point. For culture insurance broker, he said, yeah, you're a gun store. He said, this is happening to all the gun stores. And then it clicked. Then I understood why we were being canceled by all of these big banks. It's because we sell guns. And it just infuriated me. We are operating a legal business and these big banks decide they don't like that we're selling guns. And that's why Shane Stringer and Tim Nelson's bill prohibiting the merchant category codes for firearm sales this year was so important is because stuff like that allows companies to discriminate against you. So I wrote an op-ed, which, you know, you in 18, 19 published for me about a month ago. I appreciated it. I needed to get the word out there. 'Cause if this is happening to me, it's happening to everybody else. And unlike, you know, me, not everybody else has the opportunity as a statewide official to write an op-ed and get it published statewide. So everybody can see that this is happening. How many people have been de-banked that are just average ordinary Alabamians just trying to live their life and run their business that we don't even know about? That's my concern. And when I spoke to Senator Jones about my concern, he immediately said, oh my goodness, this is actually happening in Alabama. And I said, yeah, it is. I told him my story. And he said, I'm gonna fix it. I'm gonna bring a bill. And I recommended he look at Tennessee and see what they had done and try to model our bill after that. But he immediately just said, I'm gonna pick up the torch and run with it on this issue. This isn't something we can ignore. This is going to get worse, not better. - Well, Toby, what I don't understand, like, how does it fall on the, is this typically a duty of the states? Can they regulate? 'Cause it seems to me like big baking firms and New York or Delaware or wherever would be governed by federal regulations. - Well, sure, but if they wanna do business in Alabama, they're gonna be governed by our state regulations, due to some extent. And this regulation, see what the companies are gonna say is, you shouldn't pass a law telling us who we can and can't do business with. Government shouldn't be telling private businesses who they have to do business with. To which I would respond, yeah, that sounds real conservative until you realize, this is a discrimination issue. We already tell you who you can and can't do business with. For instance, you can't deny doing business with somebody because they're African American. You can't deny them for services because they're female. I say, you shouldn't be able to deny them because they're Republican or because they put out conservative social media posts or because they sell guns. That's also discrimination. And these large banks, they are the first ones to run for help to the government for a bailout when they overextend themselves and put the whole country in a crisis like happened back in 2007 and 2008. They were too big to fail and we had to bail them out. That's what they said. I say, if you're big enough you need to bail out, then you are too big to discriminate. So my thinking is we don't have a problem with community banks in Alabama. They're not the ones doing this. It's the large woke corporations that are doing this. And I'm tired of it. We need to put an end to it. - Well, tell me, how do you make that connection? Like if they drop you and they say, they don't offer you a reason. I mean, it's pretty obvious why, but they're not saying that's the reason why. - What would give a bank that they wanted to drop a customer the ability to do so? - So this is where it gets a little tricky. You're getting down in the weeds on the details of the bill. And this is an important question and we need to have good answers for this. So first of all, if they en masse drop, let's say 50 gun stores in Alabama at once, then that's very, very obvious what they're doing. If they do it one by one and spread it out over time, I admit it's still gonna be harder to catch. But remember, if they get caught breaking the law, there's gonna be some pretty stiff consequences I think that are built into this bill if they get caught breaking the law. And quite honestly, I don't think the banks are gonna be willing to take that risk. You've also got to remember, it's easy to beat up on the banks for doing this, but I'm not sure the banks even want to do this. If you're a bank, you want to do business that way, you can't make as much money as you can, right? There's a profit motive there. Why are the big banks all doing this? I think they're being pressured from these federal government to do things like this. And I think they're being pressured on their ESG scores. Other companies are pressuring them to do this. Say, hey, we'll increase your ESG score if you will stop doing business with gun stores. And I feel pressured to do that. Well, if they had the excuse of, well, Alabama has passed a law saying we can't do this. Therefore, it almost gives them some cover. You know what I'm saying? Like maybe it's not the bank that's the ultimate problem. Do you remember Operation Choke Point under Obama? Things like that. I mean, it's basically the federal government telling people, hey, we're going to view your business more negatively if you don't start doing X, Y, Z. Well, and you know, how it works, I mean, that's-- I like it like this, though. Like, who's-- if I had a business, and who's going to tell me that I can't, or I can't-- I have to do business with somebody, seems-- that does seem to kind of tread into some dangerous water. I mean, that's already happening, though. I mean, again, if you have a business, the government already tells you, you can't discriminate against somebody because of age, sex, religious background, things like that, exactly. So we've already decided discrimination is wrong. This is just adding another class of discrimination on. And by the way, I'm against discrimination the other way, too. I don't want people being debunked because they're liberals, either. Why don't we just have our political fights in the political arena and not have it in the business arena? Because we're messing with people's lives. Like, there's jobs at stake here. If you debank a gun store, they're not allowed to process credit cards. How are they supposed to pay their employees? And you're just going to run them out of business. That's my counter-argument to that. I think that's the hope. But I'm glad to see Lisa trying to stand up to some of that. Andrew, we've got to get out of here. But thanks for making time for us, and we'll talk to you soon. Yeah, always a pleasure. Enjoy the discussion. Made you surreal, our state auditor. We've got to get a break here. We'll be right back. This is The Jet Force Show on FIT Talk, 106.5. [MUSIC PLAYING] Mona tried to tell me to stay away from the train line. She said that all the railroad men just drink up your blood like wine.