A look at California’s top comptroller candidates – CalMatters

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In the race to oversee California’s budget, the two main contenders are a three-year incumbent and a challenger determined to expose fraudulent and wasteful spending.

Democrat Malia Cohen has served as Auditor (also known as California’s Accountant General) since 2023 and has raised more than $1.2 million for the campaign of re-election. It controls the spending of a country with a budget of nearly 350 billion dollars and one of the largest economies in the world. Their job is to ensure that the government spends wisely and efficiently.

As the governor and Legislature negotiate a budget deal for this year, Cohen did urged caution saying higher-than-expected spending “reinforces the need for moderation.”

Cohen also improved the state’s ability to provide key financial reporting, ie he was chronically late for years. Cohen has caught up with the release of four reports in two years, and told CalMatters that the next report (called the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report) will be almost on time, just two months late, compared to years when previous ones were delayed.

During his 2022 election campaign, Cohen said CalMatters that he plans to scrutinize government spending on homeless programs and critically analyze the Department of Employment Development and the Department of Motor Vehicles. A 2024 state audit report revealed that California does not perform Properly track your spending on homeless programs.

Cohen did not fulfill his campaign promises. He claims that’s because the state auditor has already audited those agencies. Instead of duplicating that work, he decided to focus on improving some of the internal functions of the state’s finance department. He is currently working on modernizing FI$Cal, the computer system that manages the state’s finances and public employee pay system.

“At the end of the day, I think Californians deserve to know where their money is going,” he said. “So that’s what I’m working on.”

Cohen’s main challenger, Republican Herb Morgan, has promised to fix the flaws he says his opponent left behind. Just as Cohen promised in 2022, Morgan said if elected, he would closely monitor government spending on homelessness. Their goal is to create a system where every time a government-funded nonprofit makes a payment, that transaction is recorded in a government database. Subsequently, he explained, it will use artificial intelligence to monitor those purchases and identify any suspicious activity.

As an example of how government spending can be transparently monitored, a panel publicly on your website records donations to your campaign in real time. By the end of April, $367,000 had been raised.

Morgan acknowledged that he is an exception as a Republican running in a state historically dominated by Democrats. But he believes voters will consider the qualifications of both candidates rather than vote along party lines.

“I don’t care where you are on the social spectrum, 99 percent of us are fiscally responsible,” he said. “It doesn’t mean cutting spending. It doesn’t mean stopping funding. It just means being responsible with our money. And that, I think, is attractive to all political ideologies.”

Megan Adams, a candidate for the Peace and Freedom Party, also appears. A school bus driver and resident of San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, she is president of her union and manages its finances. If elected, Adams has promised to crack down on big real estate companies that inflate rent prices, analyze the costs of implementing a unified health insurance system (Medi-Cal) and pull government investments from companies that support Israel’s war on Gaza.

By the end of April, $16,000 had been raised.