Iowa’s Auditor of the State Rob Sand visited Washington and met with elected officials from both the county and the city Thursday. Sand first gave an update on the auditor’s office and then took questions from the audience. He explained that all of the staff was an accountant and he’s since added law enforcement officers with two auditor investigators.

He also introduced his office’s PIE Initiative, which stands for Public Innovation and Efficiency, “We found those three words that spell pie together as an acronym because we thought the program would be as popular as pie, so we started from wanting to name it after pie. What’s really exciting about this to me is I think it’s going to result in a lot of savings for taxpayers at every level of government. And we have three puns that we use to talk about the program to help people understand. First the heart of the entire program is a checklist. Our pie chart is essentially a five-page list of very basic practices that result in saving taxpayer money. Most of them will result in you saving money in your own house, too if you want to put them into effect. That’s up to you, that’s your own house. As far as the public is concerned though, that’s sort of your house too, we’re spending your money so we should be doing these things.”

The pie chart is written in a way to make it easily understood and will be sent out by the end of the calendar year. It gets filled out online and will be public record. This enables the department to have their “pie contest” the following year. This will be a way to incentivize and recognize positive work in public offices. The third pun is looking for others’ pie recipes, sharing across the government offices in the state ways that entities are working to save taxpayer money to further the efficiency and savings.