A look at the top candidates vying to be California comptroller

from Marissa KendallCalMatters

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

Democrat Malia Cohen has served as Comptroller (aka California’s Accountant General) since 2023 and has raised more than $1.2 million for the competition to keep his place. It controls spending for a country with a budget of nearly $350 billion and one of the largest economies in the world. Its job is to ensure that the state spends wisely and efficiently.

As the governor and Legislature mull a budget deal this year, Cohen did urged cautionsaying higher-than-expected spending “reinforces the need for restraint.”

Cohen also improved the state’s ability to present a key financial report that was chronically late for years. Cohen has caught up by releasing four reports in two years, and she told CalMatters that the upcoming report (called the Annual Comprehensive Financial Statement) will be almost on time — just two months late, compared to years in which others have been delayed.

While running for office in 2022, Cohen said CalMatters she plans to scrutinize the state’s homeless spending and take a critical look at the Department of Employment Development and the Department of Motor Vehicles. A 2024 state auditor’s report found that California fails to adequately track their homelessness costs.

Cohen did not fulfill these campaign promises. She said that’s because the state auditor has already looked into those agencies. Instead of duplicating that work, it decided to focus on improving some internal functions of the state’s financial unit. She is in the midst of ongoing efforts to modernize FI$Cal — the IT system that manages the state’s finances — and the system that pays state employees.

“The bottom line is, I truly believe that Californians deserve to know where their money is going,” she said. “So that’s what I’m working towards.”

Cohen’s primary challenger, Republican Herb Morgan, has pledged to improve the backlog he claims his opponent left behind. As Cohen promised in 2022, Morgan said that if elected, he would scrutinize the state’s spending on the homeless. He wants to create a system where every time a government-funded nonprofit pays for something, that transaction goes into a government database. Then, he said, it will use AI to monitor those purchases and flag anything suspicious.

As an example of how government spending can be transparently tracked, public dashboard on his website registers his campaign donations in real time. It had raised $367,000 as of late April.

Morgan acknowledged that he is an outlier as a Republican running in a state historically dominated by Democrats. But he believes voters will look at 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, appeals to all political ideologies.”

Megan Adams, candidate of the Peace and Freedom Party, is also running. A school bus driver who lives in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, she is president of her union and manages its finances. If elected, Adams has promised to expose corporate landlords who raise rent prices, analyze the cost of imposing a single-payer Medi-Cal system and reject government investments from companies that support Israel’s war on Gaza.

She had raised $16,000 as of late April.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.