State auditor

Beth Wood, Candidate for State Auditor answers your questions, live on March 26 at 7 pm.

Move Over Moondoggie!

State Auditor Les Merritt is on his way to becoming the next surfing legend.

The State Auditor’s Office has used state resources for political purposes. Merritt’s office has surfed to the North Carolina Democratic Party website 217 times in the past six months. In the past two weeks alone, Merritt’s office visited our website five times.

As an avid surfer, Mr. Merritt can’t get enough of the Democratic wave.

Frontpaged by Anglico. Great post!

If you haven't seen this amazingly cool post by Jerimee, make sure you do. It's all about how Less Merit is spending taxpayer dollars to promote himself for State Auditor. And it's a classic!

It's a common practice for state officials to use the privileges of their offices to promote themselves and their ambitions. We've seen plenty of it on both sides of the aisle over the past couple of years, but that doesn't make it right. Yet no matter how much of that shady behavior you've witnessed in the past, there's something about the way Less Merit does it that will rankle even the most cynical soul.

The Dome has the story, which broke as a result of Leslie launching a new website to tell North Carolina citizens that he's (cough, cough) doing his job of tracking down fraud, waste and abuse.

The problem with Leslie's approach is that it doesn't even begin to pass the smell test of having an arm's length distance from his political ambitions. Specifically, the new site includes a freakin' BIOGRAPHY of the two-faced watchdog himself - and it reads like a campaign commercial with an open HTML tag!

Les, a native and lifelong resident of North Carolina, was born & raised on a farm in rural Sampson County. He went on to attend North Carolina State University, earning degrees in both Economics and Accounting. Les is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and Certified Financial Planner (CFP). Prior to being elected State Auditor, he served as president of Merritt, Petway, Mills & Hockaday, an accounting and auditing firm with offices in Zebulon and Raleigh.

Les and his wife, Cheryl, live in the Town of Zebulon in eastern Wake County. He has served as president of the Zebulon Elementary School PTA, the Zebulon Rotary Club and the Zebulon Lions Club and as a director with the Zebulon Chamber of Commerce. Les and Cheryl Merritt are members of Zebulon Baptist Church and have two adult children, Dale and Brooke.

North Carolina's Auditor needs to decide which job he prefers and resign from one of them. Merritt is the elected state Auditor and draws a full time salary of over $100,000 a year along with state benefits. He also remains involved in a personal venture as a retirement investment consultant.

Continuing with both jobs places him in a conflict of interest situation and he could be getting clients as a result of his state Auditor position.

Read the N&O editorial comment...

News and Observer
March 22, 2007
Editorial

Merritt in the moonlight

Les Merritt needs to resign. Oh, not from his elected post as state auditor, where he's been doing a good job watchdogging government. No, Merritt needs to bag his moonlighting as a retirement investment consultant, something he's been doing with his son, Dale.

First, the state auditor's position is full-time, paying over $100,000 a year, and Merritt should give it his undivided professional attention. Second, he should recognize the unseemliness of appearing to use his position as a high state official to attract private clients, whether he advertises in that fashion or not. Third, there is a potential for a conflict of interest if he ended up with a client who was a state employee. Read more...

More alarming news from the office of Les Merritt, our state auditor working on the state payroll and in his own personal business.

North Carolina has issued some 27,000 licenses on invalid social security numbers. Why is this a big problem? This means that thousands of drivers licenses accepted for identification and access in all sorts of situations can't be traced back to known US citizens and could be used for virtually any purpose and could allow holders to gain access to places they should not be allowed into, cash checks or withdraw funds illegally, etc.

In a state audit report released March 20th it has been stated that "auditors don’t know if the invalid Social Security numbers were intentionally used to obtain licenses" according to Chris Mears, a spokesman for the auditor’s office. “We’re assuming that some of those simply will be keypunch errors [by DMV clerks], but we thought that 27,000 was a big number,” Mears said.

Yeah, right. This is a pretty large blunder to simply write off to possible data entry errors. This means we could have hundreds or thousands of unscrupulous people loose in the state that have accepted means of identification that could now gain access to many places where they can do harm or proceed to arrange further means to obtain funds or illegal accounts or whatever might serve their purposes without anyone knowing it.

Read the report out today..

News and Observer
March 20, 2007
Dane Kane

27,000 licenses on invalid Social Security numbers

A state audit released today has found that North Carolina has issued roughly 27,000 drivers licenses to motorists based on invalid Social Security numbers.

State Auditor Les Merritt said the problem lies with licenses issued under an older system that the state Division of Motor Vehicles now uses. The new system, which the division began using in August, checks Social Security numbers automatically before issuing licenses. The old system did not.

Our North Carolina state auditor needs to have his own auditor. State ethics laws say public officials should not use their positions to promote their private business. This also indicates Les is working on the state payroll on taxpayer dollars and has other interests that could distract him from his state work. Way to go Les!

In the March 14, 2007 News and Observer...

News and Observer
March 14, 2007
Dan Kane, Jane Ruffin and Ryan Teague Beckwith, Staff Writers

State auditor's news release needed an auditor

State Auditor Les Merritt spends his days setting state agencies straight on how to operate within the law. But Merritt acknowledged a blind spot, ethically speaking, when a news release published Tuesday about his private business also touted his state position.