In a scathing audit of Maine’s 2024 spending, Maine’s Office of the State Auditor has revealed systemic financial mismanagement, cronyism-friendly contracting practices, and multiple material weaknesses across state agencies—leaving taxpayers exposed to legal risks, unnecessary costs, and outright corruption.

The audit, published Friday, reveals a shocking lack of practical and ethical guardrails for government spending after the Democrat-controlled legislature just passed an $11.3 billion budget and is prepared to spend another $300M-$600M — all funded by new taxes on tobacco, streaming entertainment, ambulances, and more.

At the center of the audit’s most troubling findings is the state’s rampant abuse of the non-competitive bidding process. Maine’s centralized procurement agency, the Office of State Procurement Services (OSPS), was found to have routinely approved contracts without conducting required cost analyses, bypassing rules meant to safeguard public dollars. This raises serious red flags about favoritism, nepotism, and possible corruption within the process for handing out state and federal cash.

The competitive bidding process, which ensures that potentially large government contracts are awarded according to an open and transparent process, has been regularly circumvented in violation of state and federal law, according to State Auditor Matt Dunlap.

The result?

More than $2.1 billion in FY2024 contract payments were made under a system the audit describes as lacking basic supervisory oversight and controls​.

The audit tested 45 contracts and found that 16 of 31 “sole-source” contracts—those exempted from competitive bidding—lacked any documentation of a required “reasonable investigation” by the Director of the Bureau of General Services.

In one case, a sole-source contract was approved after the work was completed, a blatant violation of state procurement law.

In another instance, the OSPS failed to prevent “stacking” of Low-Cost Service Contracts (LCSCs)—contracts under $5,000 designed to avoid bidding—allowing one department to award seven concurrent LCSCs to the same vendor in a year, a maneuver clearly intended to dodge oversight​.

None of the vendors who benefitted from the suspect procurement process were named in the report; however, the Maine Wire has submitted a Freedom of Access Act request to obtain any documents that would help identify those beneficiaries.

The report also found that OSPS failed to ensure that the state was securing fair prices, a lack of effort that could have cost taxpayers untold millions.

“Documentation to support performance of a cost analysis as required by State policy could not be provided for any of the 45 procurement actions tested,” the auditors wrote. In other words, in 100 percent of cases, the state agency responsible for handing out government money failed to perform a cost analysis.

Despite the legal requirement to obtain and verify cost reasonableness, the auditors noted: “While OSPS claims that there are often rigorous cost analyses in place, OSA requested documentation for cost analysis related to all 45 of the procurement documents selected in our test, and none were provided by OSPS.”

In a potentially related development, the man who would have been in charge of conducting a “reasonable investigation” into non-competitive contracts resigned last year after the Maine Wire reported exclusively on an $812,776 taxpayer-funded contract he signed for his brother’s landscaping company.

Although a DAFS spokesperson denied he was involved in the process, William J. Longfellow, the former director of the Bureau of General Services, resigned just two weeks after the Maine Wire’s report.

Longfellow never responded to the Maine Wire’s questions about how and why he signed off on the lucrative contract for his brother’s firm, and neither he nor a spokesperson for DAFS would say whether Longfellow held any shares of his brother’s company.

Under current Maine law, elected officials and certain director level job-holders are required to submit financial disclosures that show their sources of income. But those disclosures, unlike federal congressional disclosures, do not have to show non-income producing assets.

As a pure hypothetical: a Maine governor could own a large interest in a cannabis company, but so long as the company did not provide any income while she was in office, she would not be required to disclose the ownership stake.

Understandably, the audit also criticized OSPS for lacking proper checks and balances against conflicts of interests within the contract procurement system.

The findings also highlight systemic failures in oversight of vendor performance under taxpayer-funded contracts.

According to the audit, OSPS didn’t verify whether vendors had satisfactorily performed on previous contracts before granting lucrative amendments, nor did it consistently involve the Office of Information Technology in tech-related contracts—despite legal requirements to do so.

The failures flagged in the audit ultimately fall on DAFS Commissioner Kirsten Figueroa, a longtime friend of Gov. Janet Mills (D). But the failures related specifically to technology may also point toward Douglas Birgfeld III, Figueroa’s husband, whom she hired in a controversial display of nepotism shortly after taking her own job.

According to state payroll records, Figueroa and Birgfeld pulled down a combined $365,954 in taxpayer-funded compensation in 2024.

According to state records, Birgfeld’s position is described as “Director of Project Management Office,” a position that requires him to “maximize the value of project outcomes for the agency and wider State Government imperatives.”

Although the failures described in the audit are written in the characteristically tepid prose of an accountant, they point to a massive scandal in Maine state government that mirrors the fraud, waste, and abuse that has been uncovered at the federal level by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Many of the material weaknesses and significant deficiencies outlined in the audit were also reflected in the 2023 audit published last year. However, this time around, Maine has a federal government scrutinizing its practices and spending with unusual intensity.

That means the Mills’ administrations total disregard for basic anti-corruption practices has created a very real financial threat.

As the state audit report puts it: “Allowing departments to engage vendors for work prior to approved signatures on contracts creates a potential liability for the State and exposure to legal proceedings.”

This kind of backdoor dealing could ultimately force taxpayers to foot the bill for voided contracts or legal settlements​.

Litigation could come from a federal government looking to clawback awards given out through a non-transparent process in violation of federal rules. But other vendors who could have potentially bid on government contracts may also sue on the grounds that they were illegally cut out of the opportunity because someone in the state government allowed a deal to be made under-the-table.

A spokesperson for the Department of Administrative and Financial Affairs did not respond to an email asking questions about the audit findings.

“Finally, State Auditor Matt Dunlap has answered the question we’ve all been asking: Where did all the money go?” Senate Republican Leader Trey Stewart (R-Aroostook).

“For six years, Maine Democrats and Janet Mills have taken more and more money from working Mainers through higher and higher taxes to bankroll their record-breaking spending binge,” said Sen. Stewart.

“Now we know that this money has been handed out through a crooked, unfair process that rewards cronies and insiders at the expense of taxpayers,” he said.

House Republican Leader Billy Bob Faulkingham (R-Winter Harbor) said the findings from the audit only underscore his caucuses efforts to obtain greater transparency from the Mills Administration, including access to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Program Integrity unit audits.

“House Republicans have raised concerns about waste, fraud, and abuse during this entire budget process,” said Rep. Faulkingham.

“Now this audit seems to confirm those concerns were valid,” he said. “The guy who was supposed to make sure that all these no bid contracts are legitimate resigned after he was exposed for giving a contract to his brother’s landscaping company.”

“It’s time to dig even deeper into this mess now, and see exactly how poorly our tax dollars have been wasted,” he said.

The problems detailed in Dunlap’s audit don’t end with procurement.

Auditors flagged material weaknesses in the EBT program (aka Food Stamps) — where deceased individuals continued to receive benefits, totaling over $11,000 in unallowable costs — and significant deficiencies in foster care eligibility oversight, leading to improper payments and potentially endangering children in unvetted homes​​.

Elsewhere, the Department of Education’s handling of school nutrition programs was riddled with compliance failures, resulting in questioned costs upwards of $548,000 due to ineligible claims, double meal reimbursements, and misuse of Federal dollars​.

Despite repeated findings and clear evidence of dysfunction, state agencies routinely rejected the auditor’s conclusions, blaming outdated policies or “decentralized responsibilities.”

This bureaucratic finger-pointing only reinforces the perception that no one is minding the store while taxpayer money walks out the back door.

Once you translate the sterile language of the audit, the conclusion is clear: Maine’s government has turned procurement into a playground for insiders and unaccountable bureaucrats. The lack of transparency and competitive discipline has opened the door to cronyism, waste, and legal exposure—all underwritten by working Maine taxpayers.

Although previous audits have found similar neglect for competitive bidding and spending oversight, the difference now is that President Donald Trump is in the White House, Attorney General Pam Bondi is running the Department of Justice, and Kash Patel is leading the FBI.

That means every instance where Maine bureaucrats broke the rules to hand out cash awards backed by federal dollars creates a potential avenue for a new investigation, including criminal investigations, to determine how and why state and federal rules were ignored as Maine awarded lucrative government contracts.

The Maine Wire is among the only news outlet in the entire state to have reported at length on sole-sourced, non-competitive, and no-bid contracts rife with favoritism, corruption, and suspicious reasoning.

For example:

• Mills’ Millions: Maine Taxpayers Foot Bill for Absurd No-Bid Contracts
• Maine Department of Corrections to Pilot Prison Rehab Program Tailored to Muslim Inmates
• Mills Gives $130,000 No-Bid Contract to Spread False Info About COVID-19 Vaccine
• Mills Admin Supports ‘chestfeeding’ with $50k Purchase of Larger Size Nursing Bras for ‘birthing parents’
• Mills Admin to Spend $500,000 on Extending Marketing Campaign to ‘Decrease Hesitancy’ About COVID-19 Shots, Flu Vaccines
• Maine CDC Awards $90,000 Grant to Combat Diabetes in Portland’s Immigrant Population
• Mills Admin Proceeds with $15,000 Study into ‘Safe Consumption Sites’
• Maine State Library Pays $12,000 for ‘toolkit’ to Teach Children About ‘climate change and climate action’
• Mills Administration Hires California-Based Nonprofit to Guide Public Schools Toward Zero Carbon Goals
• Mills Admin Partners with Woke Brunswick Nonprofit to Train Maine Students to be Climate Change Activists
• Maine Department of Education Wants to Spend $23,500 on ‘Happiness Expert’ Motivational Speaker
• Mills Admin Discloses Payments to Press Herald for Publishing Positive Articles on Maine Public Schools, DOE Spending
• Race-Based Tourism: Maine Taxpayers Fund $165k Grant to Black Travel Influencers for Attracting ‘diverse visitors’ to State
• Maine Racial Equity Board Sponsors Educational Walking Tours to Dispel Myth that State is ‘too old and too white’
• Mills Admin Seeks to Spend $2.7 Million to Boost Recruitment of ‘racial, ethnic, and linguistic minorities’ into Workforce
• Mills Admin Hires ‘best professional cheat’ in Casino History to Advise Maine Casino Inspectors
• State DEI Commission’s Finance Committee Prohibits Public Comment After Question About Conflict of Interest
• Maine Speaker’s Racial Equity Board Gave Her Sister’s Nonprofit $12,000 for Black History Month…
• Maine DEI Board Says No Conflict of Interest with $12,000 Grant to Co-Chair’s Sister
• Gov Mills “Jobs and Recovery Plan” Diverted $1,000,000 to Maine DEI Commission…
• Corruption: Equity Panel Chief Dodges Questions Over $12k Grant to Maine House Speaker’s Sister
• After Maine House Speaker Gave Sister’s Nonprofit $12,000 in Taxpayer Money, DEI Panel Will Consider Anti-Corruption Policy
• Consulting Firm Scores $300k Contract to Advise Maine on Offshore Wind After Hiring Ex-Mills Staffer
• Mills Admin Boosts Maine Defense Contractor Recruitment Effort with $260,000 Grant
• Mills Admin Offers $300,000 ‘Social Equity Program’ Pushing Affirmative Action for Business Development
• Mills Admin Directs $462,000 Grant to Lewiston-Based Nonprofit for Services to Immigrant Victims of Domestic, Sexual Violence
• Mills Admin Seeks Immigration Law Consultants to Assist Public Defenders in Noncitizens’ Criminal, Juvenile Cases
• Mills Admin, Press Herald Entered ‘partnership’ for $117k Taxpayer-Funded Marketing Campaign Aimed at Voters, Emails Show