Tom Horne Stalled Meetings with the Auditor General over School Vouchers

For those at the Arizona Department of Education (ADE) who say there is nothing to look at with their handling and oversight of the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) Welfare/Scam Private School Voucher for the Rich Program, think again.

In reporting by the Fourth Estate, Education Department officials have apparently been stalling the Arizona Auditor General’s Office since January on requests to meet and discuss questions about the ESA Division.

In their article, Fourth Estate chronicled:

“…Email records showing all the attempts to meet and ADE not obliging over and over again, either through dodging or promising to meet but not following through.

Internal notes and emails reveal that calls went unanswered, meetings were pushed off, and confusion over scheduling persisted for half the year. In one log, an Auditor General staffer wrote that they called ESA Executive Director John Ward “multiple times” with “no ability to leave a voicemail.”

Stalled audit consultation

When Ward did reply, he cited workload and “significant resource constraints,” claiming that his team needed to finish the ESA Parent Handbook and legislative reports first. He suggested delaying the required audit consultation until March 2025, even though ADE had already begun building its own risk-based audit approach internally.”

According to the Fourth Estate, The Department, whose people finally met with the Auditors in July, after prodding from the State Legislature, has already ignored eight recommendations from a 2020 Audit report with regard to tracking and identifying “misspending and fraud.”

Remember, this is a billion-dollar program funded by working and middle-class taxpayers whose children, in large numbers, are not enrolled in this welfare/scam for the rich and enroll in the indoctrination center of your choice, a farce.

Remember, this is a program where Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes has successfully indicted out-of-state individuals for fleecing the state coffers by creating ghost students who do not exist.

Remember, this is the program that has allowed wealthy families to hoard up to $444 million in unspent funds from the program. The ESA law apparently allows these families to use these funds for post-secondary education for up to four years. $49 million is in inactive accounts. Why has the state not yet recovered the funds?

Plutocratic donor class

While the federal government tightens funding for Pell Grants for low-income and middle-class students and attempts to create its own version of a national voucher program, the ESA program in Arizona has created a college tuition nest egg for its plutocratic donor class.

No wonder Mr. Horne’s ADE does not want to meet with the Auditor General.

Who would want to when they would have to answer for their blatant incompetence and mismanagement when state funds from the non-millionaire class are being used to benefit the top one percent?

Commenting to Blog for Arizona on ADE’s refusal to meet with the Auditor General’s office over the ESA program, State Democratic House Assistant Leader Nancy Gutierrez said:

“Superintendent Horne’s unwillingness to provide the Auditor General with the necessary information to do an audit is unacceptable. There is absolutely no adequate excuse. These are taxpayer dollars, and there must be full transparency. If he is unable to perform the duties of the job, perhaps he should not be in this position.”

None of these Republicans at the state or local level who support the ESA program in its current form should continue to be in their position.

Talk about waste, fraud, and abuse on a titanic scale.

This issue should be among the top five for Democrats to prosecute against Republicans in 2026.

The ads write themselves.