When Diana DiZoglio, the Massachusetts state auditor, stepped onto the podium at the annual St. Patrick’s Day breakfast in Boston and began to sing, everyone in the room knew what was coming.
“Baby, where the hell is my audit? Do they think we forgot it?” Ms. DiZoglio crooned to the roomful of politicians, adapting lyrics from the hit Raye song “Where Is My Husband!” to fit the breakfast’s tradition of good-natured jabs at leaders in attendance.
Since November 2024, when more than 70 percent of the state’s voters approved a ballot question authorizing her to audit the Legislature, Ms. DiZoglio, a Democrat, has faced stiff resistance from lawmakers in her own party — and taken every opportunity to remind voters that their mandate has yet to be met. Her performance in March drew laughs, but the escalating conflict between the auditor and the state’s Democratic establishment is anything but lighthearted.
The clash pits Ms. DiZoglio, 42, a former state lawmaker from a blue-collar background, against a legislature that has been rated one of the least productive and most secretive in the country. To voters who have viewed the Legislature with increasing skepticism and frustration, at a moment when the Democratic establishment is on the hot seat nationally, Ms. DiZoglio’s unrelenting pursuit of the audit has become a rallying cause.
“The people’s Rockstar,” one of Ms. DiZoglio’s Facebook followers commented on a clip of her St. Patrick’s Day performance. “The future governor of Massachusetts,” wrote another.
In February, Ms. DiZoglio sued the House and Senate to try to force them to cooperate and turn over internal documents for review. The state’s attorney general, Andrea Joy Campbell, a Democrat, has said she is not opposed to the audit, but has raised questions about its scope; she also has said the auditor’s lawsuit is illegal and has asked the state’s Supreme Judicial Court to dismiss it.
The court will hear arguments in the case on Wednesday.
Legislators say they have nothing to hide, and that their concern is whether an audit of the state’s legislative branch by its executive branch would violate the separation of powers enshrined in the State Constitution.
They also point out that the Legislature already cooperates with an annual audit by an independent auditor, with results available online, and that the House has invited Ms. DiZoglio to select a firm to conduct the outside audit, an offer she has declined.
“This effort has never been about auditing the Legislature,” Representative Ronald J. Mariano, the speaker of the Massachusetts House, wrote in a recent letter to The Boston Globe. “It has been about advancing the auditor’s own political ambitions.”
Ms. DiZoglio says that the annual independent audit “cannot be truly independent,” because lawmakers “control the scope of what is audited and determine what’s off limits to review and report on.”
Both Ms. DiZoglio and Ms. Campbell are seeking re-election in November, raising the stakes of their high-profile showdown. Ms. DiZoglio is also campaigning for a new transparency measure on November’s ballot — backed by $150,000 of her own campaign funds — that would force the Legislature and the governor’s office to surrender their longstanding exemptions from the state’s open records law.
She has taken her message on the road in recent months, appearing at festivals, fund-raisers and parades where voters often ask to pose with her for selfies.
“The Statehouse is the people’s house, not the politicians’ house, and it’s the people’s tax dollars,” she told an audience at a senior center north of Boston this year. “Right now we have a Statehouse that won’t allow us into their house. So we can only wonder, what are they hiding?”
The roots of the dispute go back to 2023, when Ms. DiZoglio, newly elected as auditor, first set out to fulfill a campaign promise to audit the Legislature. She proposed examining hiring practices, committee appointments, policies and procedures in addition to financial records, a sweeping request rebuffed by legislative leaders, who told her she had no such authority.
To bolster her position, Ms. DiZoglio pushed for a statewide ballot question on her audit, which 72 percent of voters approved. In speeches, she reminds her audiences that two million people endorsed the measure legislators have rebuffed.
“Just because they don’t agree with the law the voters passed,” she said in an interview, “doesn’t mean they don’t have to follow it.”
If a political soap opera born of an audit request seems unlikely, Ms. DiZoglio’s ascent to the halls of power may be even more so. Born to a 17-year-old single mother in Methuen, a small, blue-collar city north of Boston, she has said that she encountered abuse as a child and at times lacked stable housing. She attended community college and considered becoming a nurse before earning a full scholarship to Wellesley College.
After graduating, she worked on Beacon Hill as a legislative aide, hoping to make a difference for children and teenagers facing the same challenges her family had.
In 2011, Ms. DiZoglio said, she became a target of workplace harassment after a rumor spread that she had behaved inappropriately at an after-hours Statehouse event. An investigation discredited the allegation, but Ms. DiZoglio, who was 27 at the time, said that her boss, a Republican state representative, fired her as gossip and hostility persisted.
In exchange for six weeks of severance pay, she was required to sign a nondisclosure agreement that barred her from discussing what happened or publicly criticizing elected officials.
Her family urged her to move on, but Ms. DiZoglio said she felt driven to return to the Statehouse. A year later, she ran for a House seat and won. After serving three terms, she ran for the Senate in 2018. As the #MeToo movement took off, raising awareness of sexual harassment, Ms. DiZoglio pressed for legislation to end the use of nondisclosure agreements at the Statehouse. Testifying on the Senate floor that year, she memorably broke her own agreement to make her point.
“We should not be in the business of silencing our critics,” she told lawmakers that day. The Senate did away with the practice; the House put limits on it.
In interviews, Ms. DiZoglio dismissed the insinuation, whispered in political circles, that she is still seeking revenge for past wrongs. “For people to call me ‘a woman scorned’ — you don’t say that to domestic violence victims who advocate for change,” she said.
To some, the auditor is walking a dangerous line. State Senator Cindy Friedman, a Democrat who leads a new legislative committee studying the effects of ballot questions, acknowledged that the constitutionality of the proposed legislative audit is a fair question to be taken up by courts.
But, she said, Ms. DiZoglio’s personal attacks on elected officials — “accusing us of heinous and corrupt actions,” such as buying the attorney general’s support by giving her office a funding increase — undermine public trust in government at a precarious moment for the country.
“If you disagree with us, and think you have a right to audit, fine, we can have that conversation,” Ms. Friedman said. “But when a toxic narrative takes over, and delegitimizes government, that cannot end well.”
“It has done enormous damage,” she said of Ms. DiZoglio’s allegations of corruption.
Ms. DiZoglio is not backing down. Her calls for transparency have attracted a bipartisan coalition, including fiscal watchdog groups and Republican candidates and donors. Mike Minogue, a Republican businessman running for governor, has offered to pay for outside counsel for her lawsuit.
Voters, too, are still cheering her on.
“All I can say is, we voted for it, and it became law,” said Joe Millette, 88, of Peabody, a Boston suburb, after hearing Ms. DiZoglio speak. “So to me, the case is closed.”
Jenna Russell is the lead reporter covering New England for The Times. She is based near Boston.
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