The Florida DOGE team will be able to use the city of Jacksonville’s computer system for looking up financial records even though the state will not sign the city’s standard agreement for getting access to that system.
City spokesman Phil Perry said Aug. 7 the city agreed to temporary access to the system after Florida DOGE provided information about the people who are working on the state team and city officials met with them.
The Florida DOGE team arrived at Jacksonville City Hall on Aug. 7 for a two-day on-site visit.
The city had previously told the DOGE team it would need to sign standard agreements in order to have access to the city’s information technology system. Florida Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia responded that local governments cannot put such requirements on Florida DOGE, a point he restated Aug. 7 outside City Hall.
“This should all be very easily attainable and we will not stand for anyone putting bureaucratic red tape in front of us to do our job which is to root out waste, fraud and abuse so we can bring property taxes down in the state of Florida,” he said.
Deegan said this week the city is providing all the information sought by Florida DOGE but she has a responsibility under state law to protect the security of the city’s financial data system. She said the agreement spelling out rules for use of the system and how specific people will use it is something the city requires of all external auditors.
She had reached out to Ingoglia about talking with him to reach a resolution but that didn’t happen. Ingoglia did meet with some City Council members after arriving in Jacksonville.
Deegan said she decided not to require the Florida DOGE team to sign the agreement after meeting with the state auditors when they arrived in Jacksonville. She said the “auditors were lovely” and city has worked with some of them in the past.
She said they provided “all the information we needed to have so we just exempted the form because we had the information we needed.”
In a separate matter related to Florida DOGE, Ingoglia said he has heard from employees of some local governments about meetings that discussed “scrubbing” information from public records to make it harder for auditors to find documents. He said he’s heard the effort would involve removing certain keywords to make it harder for digital searches.
“We will not tolerate any coverup of any egregious spending,” he said.
He declined to say what cities or counties are allegedly considering making those changes in their digital records. Asked specifically if Jacksonville or any Northeast Florida governments are among the local governments where those accusations have come up, he said the state “will let people know once we find the information.”
Perry said Jacksonville has not made any changes to its public records and provided all documents requested without altering them.
“We would never do anything like that,” Deegan said. “So I don’t have any reason to believe he was talking about Jacksonville.”
(This story was updated to add new information.)
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Florida DOGE gets access to Jacksonville’s computerized financial records
Reporting by David Bauerlein, Jacksonville Florida Times-Union / Florida Times-Union
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