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A few weeks ago, staffers from Republican State Auditor Dave Boliek’s office reached out to ask if we’d like to sit down with him, since he’d be in Wilmington for the day, attending a roundtable and visiting the field office here.
I said ‘yes,’ because Boliek is an interesting guy. A Democrat until 2023 (which is pretty late in the game to join the MAGAverse), he had once hoped Governor Bev Perdue would appoint him to a state senate seat. After a short stint as an assistant district attorney, he went into private practice. He also served on UNC-Chapel Hill’s board of trustees, where eventually he took a fiduciary approach to ending the university’s DEI programs – saying they didn’t offer a “return on investment to taxpayers” – ahead of the UNC system’s more sweeping efforts. He’s faced a lot of criticism, but also appears to be doing some important work – namely, audits of government organizations that, at least in theory, seem more like accountability reporting and less like partisan hackery.
Now, before I get to that, I want to touch on the issue of elections – which we did not spend much time on, but which is an omnipresent concern these days.
Boliek did note his office was working on an overhaul of the state’s current campaign finance reporting system, a mishmash of local and state, paper and digital filings that has proven frustrating for administrators, candidates, the public, and – believe me – journalists. Boliek told me they’re holding hearings with representatives from Maryland and Mississippi’s election systems, who have both conducted overhauls. Boliek said he considered it low-hanging fruit, with an “aggressive timetable of summer of ‘27 to have that in place.”
But North Carolina’s arcane campaign finance records aren’t what most people think about when it comes to Boliek and elections – the concerns I hear are less technical and more political.
On the campaign trail for the state auditor’s office in 2024, Dave Boliek ran a partisan race, securing the endorsement of Donald Trump. He hit some key conservative talking points on abortion and immigration, and donned the signature MAGA hat at a rally, according to reporting from The Assembly, which noted the contrast between the lower-key politics of former auditor Beth Wood, a Democrat who was praised for her bipartisan approach (at least, prior to her ignominious resignation).
After winning office, Boliek took over the state’s election system when the Republican controlled General Assembly shifted appointment power from the governor to the auditor’s office (North Carolina has been the only state to do so). The law was decried by Democrats and sparked concern about how Boliek would handle the increasingly fraught business of conducting elections, due both to his lack of experience and political alignment.
So far, however, there have been no election shenanigans to lay at Boliek’s feet. Last year, Boliek appointed new chairs to the county boards of election, all Republicans, meaning those local boards all had 3-2 Republican majorities (and, of course, when Democratic Governor Roy Cooper was in office, he had appointed all Democrats to chair positions, meaning they inversely had 3-2 Democratic majorities). Here in New Hanover County, Boliek appointed Jamie Getty, who previously served on the old three-person board back in 2016 when I first covered local elections; Getty has, by all accounts, maintained a sane and stable working relationship with Democratic board member Derek Miller, the former chair.
Under that new Republican leadership, Democrats swept in the 2025 Wilmington City Council election. The election went smoothly and – other than one October surprise claim of vote-buying that apparently went nowhere – there were no allegations of anything untoward.
More recently, Boliek ruffled some feathers when he declined to recuse himself in the Republican primary between Rockingham County Sheriff Sam Page and longtime State Senator Phil Berger, whom Boliek (and Trump) had endorsed. Boliek argued recusal wasn’t necessary because he had no role in the actual vote tallying. And, in the end, it’s hard to argue Boliek put his finger on the scale: Berger exhausted his statutorily allowed recounts and, in one case where Berger asked for an uncommon hand recounting of certain ballots, the state elections board rejected his request.
The real acid test, many say, will be in the 2026 midterms. Elections workers fear they will face myriad challenges: false claims about noncitizen voting, lies about stolen elections, the presence of ICE agents at or near polls, weaponized public records requests, and the use of lawfare to stall and sow distrust in the electoral process. Boliek has promised to “leave politics at the door,” and he’ll almost certainly have more opportunities to prove that.
In the meantime, though, I wanted to talk to Boliek about his approach to the meat and potatoes of his office – auditing.
Making a splash
One of the first things that caught my attention from Boliek’s office was a November press release with a headline I would have expected from a pugnacious daily paper rather than a state office: “$32.99 Stuffed Flounder, Fast and Loose Spending by Elizabeth City Officials Uncovered in Investigative Report.”
“Well, I am a former reporter,” Boliek told me. “I graduated from journalism school at Chapel Hill and was a newspaper reporter. I was a beat reporter. In fact, there is a cover of the Thomasville Times, which is where I had my first job, where I had every byline on the front page and a photo credit.”
A side note, Boliek’s parents were both reporters. In particular, his father is remembered as a hard-charging news guy, and, perhaps ironically, the bane of state government officials in the mid-1980s, as remembered by consultant Brad Crone.
“In state government at the time, there were two people you never wanted to see telephone messages from, the first was Pat Stith with the N&O and second was Dave Boliek [Sr.] For the bureaucrats, Dave Boliek could be a big pain in the butt,” Crone wrote for NC Spin in 2018 after Boliek Sr. passed.
I asked Boliek if he’d heard any pushback over the punchy announcement, but he said no – but acknowledged you had to have a variety of approaches.
“I think you've got to have a mixed bag in the State Auditor's Office,” he said, pointing to a recent audit of Rocky Mount. “A lot of people thought, well, this would be some sort of salacious audit, and that's an audit that's just facts.”
Boliek said he felt that getting the attention of policymakers and the public was crucial, adding that the end goal is not to upend local governments or organizations, but to help them run more smoothly. That doesn’t always mean spending less, just more effectively, Boliek said, pointing to his office’s performance audit of the DMV, whose inefficiencies had become a legendary and bipartisan headache.
“And that was an audit where, for example, one of our top-line recommendations was to add individual license examiners. I think a lot of people would have anticipated on the front end that that would not have been a recommendation,” Boliek said.
Boliek acknowledged that his office couldn’t fix everything, but played an important role.
“Did the auditor flip a switch and make everything all right? No. But what we did do is put it on the front page of the newspaper and on every TV station across the state of North Carolina and in every legislator’s district and in the governor's front yard, and we all had conversations and got together and were able to move forward. Is it fixed 100%? No. But I think we're on the right path,” he said.
Catch as catch can
North Carolina has 100 counties, over 500 municipalities, more than 100 school districts, in addition to public universities, and a host of state agencies with hundreds of subdivisions. And for almost every one of those, there’s probably at least one person who would like to see Boliek do a thorough audit.
“I know everybody wants their city, their county, their school board audited. I know from the voicemails on my personal cell phone and from the tip line. So we want to be able to answer the call on behalf of everybody in North Carolina,” he said.
But relying on tips and whistleblowers means the work of government accountability can be a bit of a crap shoot. Journalists have had this issue forever – without leads and sources, the work can be very difficult, and there aren’t enough reporters to go through every purchase order of every government budget. That means the results are sometimes ‘catch as catch can,’ as I put it to Boliek – which can cause audience capture and misrepresent the broader picture.
“I think that's a fair observation, that it's catch as catch can. It's clear that from the time I took office in January of 2025, our team really wanted a new vision for the State Auditor's office,” Boliek said. “But in order to get to that point, you've got to get your team in place, and you have to get the professionals in a cadence and within a way of doing things.”
Boliek said he had 40 openings on a 159-person staff when he took office. The legislature has since authorized another 45 positions, and Boliek said he’s hired over 87 people since he started.
Boliek also said there were some entities whose size and budget made them clear priorities – like the North Carolina Education Lottery – which over the last few years has seen revenue rise by billions, while contributions to public schools have gone flat or decreased slightly.
“When you've got $3 billion in added revenue over a two-year period of time, yet basically flat contributions to public education during that same time period – if you're the elected state auditor, and you don't start asking the question, should we perform a performance audit? I don't think you're awake, and I don't think you're doing your job,” Boliek said.
While the lottery gets an audit every year as part of the state’s annual comprehensive financial report, Boliek said in the coming weeks his office will release a more aggressive performance audit, which he said will be the first the state auditor’s office has done since 2008.
Another required audit that went a bit further than the regular annual checkup was the Battleship U.S.S. North Carolina, which was, as Boliek put it, “a trainwreck,” on several levels.
“It was just inconsistencies. There was turnover in the finance department. There was turnover in the leadership of the organization, and there was just sort of a lack of paying attention to what was going on with the finances,” Boliek said.
While the battleship got a lot of negative publicity, Boliek said the goal was long-term stability. Unable to avoid the pun, he said, “We don’t want to sink the battleship, right?”
“We don't just go in and do an audit and then leave them out there hanging. Our team will follow up, and they're getting things straight at the battleship, because it is an anchor to downtown Wilmington and to the New Hanover County community. It is something that is valued. It is part of the community. It needs to be there long term,” he said.
Technology
However splashy or high-profile the result of an audit ends up being, the actual work is fairly monotonous. Take an audit of government spending – not the big-picture budget summaries that elected officials often talk about, where the conversation is at the level of departments and major projects, but the granular level of individual purchases like office supplies, gas for travel, or, yes, a $32 stuffed flounder dish. These are captured in ‘p-card’ (a purchasing or procurement credit card) receipts, of which there can be hundreds, or thousands.
“You know, in the old days – I like to say, which was 10 months ago – you'd pull the statements out, and you'd pull whatever records the town had, and you'd lay them out on the conference table and go through them with a highlighter,” Boliek said.
I’ve done this myself, and it is incredibly tedious. My former Port City Daily colleague Michael Praats and I once went through the purchase reports for County Manager Chris Coudriet’s office and, after hours, discovered nothing more salacious than that the office appeared to prefer Perrier to still water.
AI technology has made that process much faster, even with huge tranches of P-card reports.
“Today, we're able to take what previously would have taken two months, and we're able to filter that down, and it takes two days to analyze now an entire municipality's P card records, because we're using generative AI that we've built on the Microsoft Databricks platform,” Boliek told me.
Boliek said his office ran iterations to hone the technology, with the error rate going down each time. Of course, even really good AI can hallucinate or make errors, so a human has to go behind the machine and check. But there are real time savings, Boliek said, that give his staff of 204 people a much broader reach. To that end, more P-card analyses are being done: Elizabeth City just came out, Rocky Mount, Cary, and others are forthcoming.
Technology will also power a broad review of general obligation bonds across the state, Boliek told me. The voter-approved bonds represent billions of dollars, which often take years, sometimes over a decade, to spend fully. Boliek said a “truly different vision” for his office is to be “a tracker of dollars, as opposed to just a retrospective look back” at the bonds.
“As we gather that data and report on just the facts, we can then see areas that need a deeper look, right? It becomes self-evident. Instead of going on a fishing expedition, we look broadly across the entire state, and you can start to develop patterns of how money is spent on general obligation bonds, and then maybe ask even broader questions across multiple communities,” Boliek said.
(This is, I’ll note, the approach a lot of journalists are taking, trying to balance the obvious power of AI with an ethical responsibility. We’ve started using some powerful software to crunch numbers and scan documents, but at the end of the day, it’s always a real human reporter who confirms a detail or data point, and asks the right follow-up questions. The perverse incentives to the former and not the latter are obvious, and I worry not all journalists can avoid the temptations, but I’ll leave that for another column.)
More power, more partisan?
Boliek has a vision for a more rigorous and proactive auditor’s office that would, necessarily, be more powerful. Boliek said he is committed to a nonpartisan approach – to be, as I put it, an equal-opportunity offender in conducting audits that turn up issues in both Democratic and Republican-run government bodies and agencies.
To be clear, Boliek said nothing to indicate a desire to embarrass anyone, but the truth is a bad audit is embarrassing (and it probably should be, since the job of government is to be a good steward of public money). As a journalist, I’d like to see the embarrassment spread around.
To put it another way, Boliek’s pledge to avoid partisanship probably won’t win over skeptics unless there’s at least some kind of body count on both sides of the aisle. He doesn’t have to go full Mercutio, setting a pox on both houses, but if it’s not clear that he can call balls and strikes for both teams, questions – and criticism – will remain.
There’s the question of the long-view, as well, although it’s fallen out of favor in our ‘win now, pay later’ political moment. But, for the remaining institutionalists, it’s worth considering, as I framed it for Boliek, what it might look like down the line with a revanchist Democrat, retaliating against Republican small governments and trying to nail elected officials for having an extra glass of wine at a conference. (And, of course, there could be an equally vengeful Republican after that, and so on and so on, turning the good work of government accountability into one more internecine trench war.)
I asked Boliek if he considered building safeguards against abuse into his expanded office, or if he had to just “trust whoever’s in charge” after him.
“You know, elections are the best way for the public to monitor that,” he said, reiterating what he’s told The Assembly and others, that he does his best “to leave the party label at the door.”
Boliek said he thinks his office’s work will dispel concerns about partisanship.
“There'll be some things that our office delivers on behalf of the people, by way of audits, investigations, and rapid responses, that I think should assuage any concerns about politicalization, because, you know, you've got to be able to look at all public dollars, regardless of what political party may be in charge of an appropriation or in charge of an administration,” he said.
DOGE-ing North Carolina
Last year, as the Trump Administration came into office, Elon Musk led the DOGE attempt to reduce government inefficiency. There was some populist appeal to the idea, at least on paper. You could go as far left as Bernie Sanders, who said Musk was “right,” at least about the Pentagon, and find some agreement about government waste. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, Musk’s chainsaw-wielding bluster – and claims that he could cut $1 trillion or more in waste – didn’t survive contact with reality, although it caused a fair amount of chaos and concern, and some real damage to human beings, at home and abroad.
Still, DOGE clearly inspired state and small-government efforts around the country to take a hard look at their own finances (although most, thankfully, had the sense not to hire a 19-year-old programmer who goes by ‘Big Balls’). But it’s proven difficult for many fiscal conservatives to really get the kind of dramatic improvements in government efficiency that Musk promised.
I asked Boliek if the ‘dream of DOGEing’ was dead, or if that kind of large-scale, system-wide overhaul was still possible.
“Well, I don't call it DOGEing in North Carolina, call it Dave,” Boliek said. “I’m joking, but it’s true – [the General Assembly] did pass the DAVE act,” which created the Division of Accountability, Value, and Efficiency.
But Boliek said he didn’t start his tenure with a DOGE effort.
“We started with trying to take a look at how we can be data-driven, because what you want is sustainable efficiency efforts across government,” he said. “You don’t want flash in the pan, get a couple of pelts or a couple of notches on your belt, and then move on. What we wanted was to have a sustainable program.”
In most cases, Boliek said the goal is to ensure the public is getting a good return on their investment, not slashing and burning because of ideological opposition to the very existence of government as we know it. But, he acknowledged, there will be times when his office recommends making cuts or ending programs.
“I do think when we find areas where there is a government program, where there is no plausible explanation or metric to show a return on dollars, that's something that we at the State Auditor's office need to have the courage to say, ‘maybe this program should go the way of the buggy whip.’ Maybe it's time to move on from this, because it's not providing value to the taxpayer, and we can redeploy those dollars to something that will return investment,” he said.
It remains to be seen how much common ground Boliek can find. As with Boliek’s assessment of DEI’s return on investment at Chapel Hill a couple of years ago, there’s bound to be disagreement.
But at the same time, I’ve time and again seen concerns with government spending that crossed party lines or just transcended them: the River Place cost overruns, the financially sketchy iteration of Project Grace that would’ve seen the county leasing its own property, the hospital sale, the purchase of the Thermo Fisher building, the city’s deal with Live Nation – I could go on, but you get the idea.
Some of these may have passed muster, but I suspect others would not have. But in either case, it would have been really great to have a good audit
