Politics
“This will move forward,” Attorney General Andrea Campbell said on Boston Public Radio Wednesday.
Diana DiZoglio, the Massachusetts state auditor, at the Greek Independence Day Parade in Boston, April 26, 2026. Sophie Park/The New York Times
Attorney General Andrea Campbell said Auditor Diana DiZoglio can hire an attorney to continue her fight to audit the Legislature after the state’s highest court set a new deadline for the attorney general last week.
The Supreme Judicial Court heard oral arguments last week to rule on whether DiZoglio can sue the Legislature for not complying with her voter-mandated audit. On Friday, justices set a 30-day deadline for the AG to “make a final determination as to the Auditor’s request for representation.”
Campbell said Tuesday that the audit can move forward after DiZoglio narrowed her scope to four areas, all related to Senate finances, according to the SJC order.
“I have a letter that will come from my office to the auditor allowing her to proceed to appoint an attorney to then go into court with respect to those four things, and this will move forward,” Campbell said, speaking on Boston Public Radio at the Boston Public Library after an audience question about the audit.
DiZoglio, a Democrat, has made auditing the Legislature her top priority after nearly 72 percent of Massachusetts voters approved of a ballot measure specifying that the state auditor has the authority to audit the Legislature.
“We hope the AG will follow the court order without throwing up any additional procedural roadblocks to continue to stall this audit,” DiZoglio said. “The AG has been required to make a decision on — verbatim — the same exact records requests we laid out to her back in January 2025, despite her claims otherwise.”
In a statement, the auditor said attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, who ran in the 2022 Democratic primary for attorney general and lost to Campbell, will represent the audit in court.
“We are grateful to the Justices of the SJC, who – within just a matter of hours – were able to understand and decide on our specific requests made in January 2025, after the AG gaslit us for the last year and a half – effectively blocking us from accessing the courts,” DiZoglio said in a statement.
The auditor and the attorney general have publicly clashed over the Legislative audit, particularly after DiZoglio sued the Legislature in February without Campbell’s support. The Legislature itself refused to participate in her first audit before the ballot question, and House leaders have indicated they will not comply in the future.
According to the SJC order, DiZoglio has limited her request for representation to force the Legislature to produce, for fiscal years 2021 through 2024, the official budgets for the Senate, copies of official audits of the Senate, a listing of all transactions related to the Senate’s balance forward line item, and a listing of all monetary agreements entered into by the Senate with any current or former employees or members of the Senate.
“They pushed her to actually commit to an audit that only included four areas, and those four areas, she cannot go outside of that,” Campbell said on the radio program. “Those are the very specifics we were looking for. The court just gave it to us.”
When pressed by host Jim Braude about whether or not DiZoglio will be able to go outside those four areas in the future, Campbell said “I want to be careful here. … If she wants to bring something up later, the court will have to play a role in that too, because it will depend.”
While the current legal dispute only considers those four areas, it “in no way” limits the auditor’s office from requesting additional records, DiZoglio said.
“We are not going to ask the Legislature for a few records, call it an audit, and tell the taxpayers that’s all they get because the Attorney General’s public comments sought to box us in,” DiZoglio said.
Molly Farrar is a general assignment reporter for Boston.com, focusing on education, politics, crime, and more.
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