Assessor Vows to Block Further Audit of Office

In a rare public dispute, recently elected Los Angeles County Assessor John Lynch has vowed an all-out fight to prevent the completion of an audit of his office, county Auditor-Controller Mark Bloodgood said Monday.

Bloodgood said in a report to the Board of Supervisors that he was told by Lynch last week that an audit would be resisted. He said he encountered Lynch in an elevator and was told in “loud and clear tones that my audit staff would not be allowed to return short of our obtaining a court order which, if one is obtained, he said he would fight all the way to the (U.S.) Supreme Court.”

Bloodgood, contending that he is required by state law to audit all county departments, will ask the Board of Supervisors today to intervene. He said in an interview that a court battle over the issue may indeed become necessary.

“None of this makes any sense to me,” said Bloodgood, who added that never in his 20 years of service in the auditor-controller’s office has a department head tried to stop an audit.

Lynch could not be reached for comment Monday, but he has said in the past that the state Board of Equalization already audits each county assessor’s procedures and therefore Bloodgood’s review is unnecessary. The state agency, however, does not go into as much detail as the county in its audits of assessor records.

Bloodgood said he has been trying for four months to complete an audit of the assessor’s office that was begun in February, 1986. On Dec. 8, two days after Lynch succeeded Alexander Pope as assessor, Lynch ordered Bloodgood’s auditing staff to leave his office, telling reporters later that the audit was disruptive.

Shortly after the dispute first surfaced in December, it appeared to have been settled in a meeting of Bloodgood, Lynch and Supervisor Mike Antonovich in Antonovich’s office. Bloodgood agreed to hold off completion of the audit until Lynch had time to reorganize the office.

Bloodgood said Monday that his office has been in regular contact with Lynch’s office ever since to determine exactly when the audit could resume. He has received nothing but vague responses, he said.

“I thought I had been getting stalled off,” Bloodgood said. “(Lynch) is not in a position to tell us we can’t audit.”

Lynch’s chief deputy, Jack McLean, said it is “essentially correct” that Bloodgood would resume his audit “when the reorganization is complete and it’s not complete yet.” He said that the Lynch reorganization could take another nine days.

McLean added that he was not privy to the elevator encounter between Lynch and Bloodgood and therefore could not comment on it.

Bloodgood said he tried to persuade Lynch months ago that anything negative that might have turned up would only “rub off on your predecessor (Pope) anyway, but that didn’t work.”

Lynch, a conservative Republican who served as a low-level assessor’s appraiser for many years, was elected to the nonpartisan countywide post in November.