(The Center Square) – Embracing artificial intelligence wasn’t just a way to do business when Dave Boliek stepped into the auditor’s office for North Carolina.
“We've thrown jet fuel on the computer technology here at the auditor's office,” the first-term Republican said Wednesday in an appearance with Greg Bishop on The States by The Center Square. “It has really enabled us to expand our reach. We now have, as of actually two days ago, we have now 229 full-time positions here at the auditor's office, so it's a relatively small office, but the technology is incredible.”
Size challenges are overcome, he said, through strategy.
“I felt like from the point of view of being the state auditor, you don't want to be behind the technology of agencies and entities that you're auditing,” Boliek said. “You want to be on the forefront of technology, so you don't get the auditee ahead of you on technology. You want to be ahead of them, and so we started from Day 1, we've utilized partners in the industry to leverage AI.”
Boliek said because of that, his team can get after large data sets.
“It's enabled us, initially, to focus on areas where we think that we can get a full return on taxpayer resources from the auditor's office stand standpoint to be able to identify places where money might be wasted, where there is potential fraud, and where there is potential abuse of taxpayer dollars,” Boliek said.
Boliek, the second elected Republican auditor for the state since 1876, and his office has produced a number of analyses, some of which were jaw-dropping in revelation. Among them were an audit of the Division of Motor Vehicles that helped lead to a reduction in wait times; lapsed state salaries; recovery from Hurricanes Matthew (2016) and Florence (2018) in the Cooper administration; and an audit of the Charlotte public transit system in the wake of Iryna Zarutska’s death late last summer.
“I will concede that AI by itself, we don't have the confidence and the reliability to say, ‘OK, computer spit out this result,’ and then we just take the result as the computer produces it,” Boliek said. “We do put what I call shoe leather behind these reports with human verification of findings, but what the AI in a use case has really enabled us to do is to find that needle in a haystack very quickly, and if we, because we can do that, we can focus the team in places where the juice is worth the squeeze.”
He said it’s enhanced efficiency with audits of procurement cards that are popular in municipalities. And, it’s helped shine light in more longer-term projects, such as the Mid-Currituck Bridge at the Outer Banks near the Virginia border.
“And it's a bridge that actually doesn't exist,” Boliek told The States. “I mean, this is a project that's been contemplated for the last 30 years. It is a project in which taxpayers have contributed $61 million but yet there's not been a single piece of dirt turned in terms of producing that project, so it's not like the famed bridge in Alaska that goes to nowhere, it's actually a bridge that doesn't exist.
“And so, AI has been helpful with that, because we've been able to take that broad stroke look across our Department of Transportation to find these areas where a lot of taxpayer dollars are expended, and there's nothing to show for it.”
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