Becoming an auditor

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Thursday, December 15th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: The watchdogs of government.

They’re known by various titles: state auditor. Comptrollers, examiners, and inspectors general. Whatever title is used, each supervises public finances.

REICHARD: Today, WORLD Senior Writer Kim Henderson introduces us to Mississippi’s state auditor. It’s a role he’s been preparing for a long time.

KIM HENDERSON, SENIOR WRITER: Mississippi State Auditor Shad White is making a name for himself as a corruption fighter. Like when he uncovered the biggest fraud scheme in Mississippi’s history—more than $77 million in misspent welfare money.

ANCHOR: New cases have been unsealed involving a mother and son accused of millions . . .

But before all that, White made a name for himself at Northeast Jones High School.

TUCKER: I always loved Shad. He was just one of those kids that was in there. He was easy-going—never a discipline problem, never. Went by the rules, you hear me? Shad’s going to go by the rules.

That’s Ann Tucker. She taught White when he was in ninth grade. She’s been teaching at Northeast Jones for 63 years.

TUCKER: He was not the kind of kid that was out there just tooting his horn and doing all that kind of stuff. He was motivated, had his goals in mind even then. Was even thinking about college I remember, in 9th grade.

Tucker also taught former NBA player Kenny Payne, U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, and Erin Napier, the HGTV star. But these days, she’s really happy to have a former student sitting in the state auditor’s office.

There, Shad White has been pretty busy.

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White is a married father of two preschoolers, with another child on the way. Since taking office four years ago, he’s recovered more than $65 million dollars. He was only 32 when he started the job. His youthfulness seems almost out of place in the state office building, a 1949 Art Deco high-rise.

White is clean cut, with a short hairstyle fitting his side gig: JAG officer for the Mississippi Air National Guard.

WHITE: I had a really happy childhood in a little bitty town . . .

White came from a blue-collar family, but he seems custom-made for fighting white-collar crime. He went to college with his game face on.

WHITE: Plenty of people use it as a resort for four years, and, you know, in my mind that wasn't why I was there. By the end of my college career at Ole Miss, I felt like I had leveraged the place as much as I possibly could . . .

White studied economics, but he also fell in love with politics. He made Ole Miss history as the only student to snag both the Truman and Rhodes Scholarships. The Rhodes win took White to England.

WHITE: The University of Oxford has a reputation as a Keynesian school. And I disagreed a lot with the Keynesian worldview . . .

But the school brought in visiting professors and speakers.

WHITE: It was a really interesting intellectual environment because I felt like I got to see multiple viewpoints on the economy.

Harvard Law School came next. There, White served as president of the Federalist Society, a conservative organization.

WHITE: It made me the most popular person on campus, as you can imagine. (laughs)

But under White’s leadership the group grew to become the largest chapter in the country. He platformed speakers that were new to many Harvard Law students. 

WHITE: . . . to talk about the importance of stable families, a mother and the father in the home. We brought in a professor to talk about the legality of prayer before public meetings. We brought professors in to talk about the benefits of entrepreneurship.

White is the son of a youth minister father and a church organ-playing mother. He says being a Christian makes his job as state auditor easier, because he believes in absolute truth.

WHITE: We're not living through some sort of postmodern landscape where everything is debatable in the auditor's office. We're enforcing rules around how you can and cannot spend public money . . .

When he speaks to crowds, White describes auditors as “fact finders.” Not everyone is thrilled with what his team uncovers.

WHITE: You have the chance to do really meaningful work, but it comes at a price, and the price is that you're going to have to weather some criticism pretty regularly. And that's okay, because that's the price of admission.

White gets hate mail, threatening messages on Facebook. Fellow church members have told White he was wrong to arrest some of the defendants in the welfare case currently rocking the state. 

WHITE: I wake up and I pray that prayer from First Kings, Solomon's prayer for wisdom. “God, give me the knowledge to know good from evil,” and that gives me the confidence I need to come in every day and do this job in an even handed way.

White is confident, but he’s not cocky. He just says he’s committed to making Mississippi as corruption-free as possible.

WHITE: I view politics as a way to obtain offices that are necessary to hold in order to drive good policy forward.

And that has his high school English teacher, Ann Tucker, both smiling and a little concerned.

TUCKER: Every time I see in the paper where he has done something. I'm always telling my husband, “Well, if he runs for something else, I hope he's got somebody good coming in for his office.” I want this to continue—what he's doing—because it is just long overdue.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Kim Henderson in South Mississippi.

REICHARD: To see photos and read the full print feature story about Shad White’s fight against corruption, look for the December 24th issue of WORLD Magazine and we’ll post a link to the digital version of the story in today’s transcript of this program.

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