Asst. Atty. Gen. Rob Sand Is Running for State Auditor

Caption: Rob Sand, Assistant Attorney General for the State of Iowa, who prosecuted the $25 million lottery scam that fixed seven lottos in five states. He also prosecuted the film tax break scam and a con artist ripping off people in Kossuth County. The con artist is in prison now. Rob Sand proudly said that he has prosecuted Republicans and Democrats. He's from Decorah, IA, and the Norwegian sweater he was wearing is from the Vesterheim Museum there.

Floyd Gardner introduced Assistant Attorney General Rob Sand at our Progressive Minds luncheon in Altoona, IA, on February 16, 2018. Floyd teased us about being psychic and having a vision of Rob, a slippery rock, a fjord, and running water. Actually, Floyd, 80, knows Rob's great-aunt Janet, and she told him the story of how nine-year-old Rob fell off a slippery rock into a Norwegian fjord.

"It wasn't as bad as it sounds," Rob said.

I teased him when I took his photo and mentioned that he looked like he was 17, but once he started talking, there was no doubt that he is a serious man with an impressive resume.

He started out in politics by getting a skateboard park built in Decorah when he really was 17. It wasn't done in time for him to use it, but he enjoyed the process of getting it built. He planned to be a teacher originally, but then he went to law school.

When the Menlo town clerk stole a bunch of money, he prosecuted the clerk.

"Was she a woman?" I asked.

"Yes," he said. "Most embezzlers are women."

"Well, we're bound and determined to get equal pay for equal work one way or another," I replied.

Everyone laughed, but one person though I was saying something about myself. No I wasn't. It was just an observation I've made about embezzlers in the news, and a theory I have about why so many embezzlers are women.

Rob wondered, he said, about what he could do that's more positive than prosecuting criminals. He noted that nobody in the auditor's office is a cop or an attorney. They're all certified public accountants (CPAs). He looked into the Code of the Auditor's Office. According to the Iowa Code, the auditor's office is supposed to reduce waste and save money to improve efficiency. Every year they audit every city in Iowa. Instead of finding waste and inefficiencies, he said, "they're sitting on their hands."

"We want to be accountable with our tax dollars. When Dick Johnson (R) was state auditor, he said that former Gov. Terry Branstad (R) was cooking the books," Rob said.

Chris Hall (D-Sioux City) filed a lawsuit against Gov. Kim Reynolds (R-IA) alleging that Reynolds and her budget director, David Roederer (R), transferred $13 million from reserve funds in violation of Iowa Code, which calls for a special session of the legislature before transferring funds if certain contingencies are not met.

Gov. Reynolds didn't want to call for a special session because that would have called attention to her and the Republican majority in the legislature's mismanagement of state funds; namely, giving huge tax credits to giant corporations like Apple and Google, which don't need them, and short-changing constituents with cuts to public education (K-12), Medicaid (which has been privatized to the disadvantage of patients and providers), higher education, and other budget items that help constituents instead of rich donors.

"The state auditor's office has 30 CPAs. What the auditor's office needs is a criminal prosecutor," Rob said.

"Mary Mosiman attended fewer Iowa Communications Network (ICN) oversight meetings than anyone. She asked a total of three questions when she did come. The ICN's executive director, Ric Lumbard, was also full time at Wind and Fire Ministries. He paid a woman at his church to be his secretary, bumped up her salary, and took her with him on vacations to Belize without claiming that he'd taken any vacation time on payroll. His double duty at two full-time jobs was on the front page of the Des Moines Register. Lumbard misspent nearly $380,000. How did Mary Mosiman miss this?

The only reason Ric Lumbard's mismanagement came to light was that he had a heart attack.

Rob Sand said, "I'm running because we need to wake up the watchdog. The state auditor is supposed to be our watchdog. There's a watchdog icon on the state auditor's office website.

"Steven Leath, the former president of Iowa State University, crashed a plane in Illinois, and that's how we found out that he had private planes for his own use for personal jaunts to North Carolina where he has a home and spent a lot of money, taxpayer money, on those jaunts."

Sand sought more information on the Steven Leath plane crash and use of planes for private purposes but was stopped from further investigation by the Board of Regents, whose attorney contacted Attorney General Tom Miller to put a stop to Sand's inquiries. Sand sent the information he had to Story County prosecutor Jessica Reynolds, but she declined to do anything with the evidence. Corruption in Iowa is not new; Leath was protected by Iowa State and the Board of Regents. Now he's the president of Auburn University in Alabama.

When I watched Rob Sand's face while he discussed criminal prosecution and lax oversight, I was impressed. He impressed all of us. Floyd said he hadn't been so excited about a candidate in a long time. Me too. Rob Sand sounds like a quietly impassioned straight arrow. We need him as state auditor and we need more like him to get rid of the rampant corruption in our Board of Regents and at the highest levels of state government.