Thinking she might briefly gain access to the powers of an acting governor, Auditor Diana DiZoglio drafted an executive order to ban state agencies from mandating non-disclosure agreements in settlements with employees, a long-held goal of hers.
DiZoglio thought she was going to be serving as acting governor on Tuesday, with other constitutional officers out of state. Gov. Maura Healey, Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll, Secretary of State Bill Galvin and Attorney General Andrea Campbell are delegates at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and Treasurer Deb Goldberg is traveling for a wedding and away for the week, POLITICO first reported.
DiZoglio said she did not plan to sign the agreement, even if she had been made acting governor, because the Healey administration has said they would work with her on issues of transparency.
"I do not feel that that would have been a way to make meaningful and positive change, positioning the administration to come home to a signed Executive Order," she said. "It's my intention to partner with this administration."
The auditor said she was told last week that she would be made acting governor for a few hours Tuesday morning between when Driscoll left for the convention in Chicago and when Galvin returned, but said that due to "a misunderstanding or error made in another schedule," Driscoll is leaving for Chicago later than planned, and Galvin will touch back down in Massachusetts before the lieutenant governor leaves.
"I was surprised with the information that I would be acting governor, and I was subsequently, due to that fact, peppered with questions, consistently asked all week long, every day, what my plans were for the moments that I would be able to serve in that role," DiZoglio told reporters at a press conference on Tuesday morning. "And it caused me to think about some things that I had never really thought about before from that perspective. And I was informed that I would have the opportunity to potentially highlight some issues where we could make meaningful progress in the state of Massachusetts, and identify ways to help people."
Before her successful auditor campaign in 2022, DiZoglio served three terms in the House and two terms in the Senate.
In 2018, during her push to rein in the use of non-disclosure agreements in the House, DiZoglio said from the chamber floor that she had signed a deal "under duress" when she was a House aide and her boss fired her following discredited rumors of inappropriate behavior.
The order her office distributed to reporters Tuesday would have banned agencies from imposing NDAs on employees in order to come to a settlement agreement, and allowed victims or claimants to make the choice of whether they would like the agreement to be confidential.
She added, "Full transparency, since that's the theme of the conversation today, if this was the previous administration, I likely would have very strongly considered signing this proposal if I would have been acting governor during the previous administration, because the previous administration repeatedly and consistently opposed any and all reforms to the abuse of taxpayer dollars that are used in these non disclosure agreements."
DiZoglio said her office is also conducting an audit of all settlement agreements across all state agencies over the past 12 years, and is working with the administration to do so. She said they have encountered difficulty obtaining documents from executive departments, but her counsel declined to share which agencies due to the ongoing audit.
