Weak, undocumented oversight of two major funding channels over a three-year window — with real, credited progress underway since May 2025 that hasn't yet closed the gap.
What the audit found
The Governor's Office of Economic Development is Utah's lead economic development agency, responsible for the state's unified economic development strategy and more than 40 grant, loan, and tax-incentive programs. The Legislature asked the Office of the Legislative Auditor General to review the office's operational efficiency — and specifically, the millions of dollars in pass-through funding it administers.
Auditors reviewed award activity from fiscal years 2023 through 2025 and found that GOED "cannot consistently demonstrate how awardees used" nearly $249 million in funds, or whether that money achieved its intended results. The audit traces the gap to two funding channels with weaker oversight than the rest of GOED's portfolio: pass-through grants, awarded without a competitive process, and the Industrial Assistance Account (IAA), an application-only program for companies offering the state an "economic opportunity."
Why "GOED" and not "GOEO"?
The office audited here was called the Governor's Office of Economic Opportunity (GOEO) for most of the period this report covers. H.B. 475, passed in the same 2026 session as this audit, renamed it the Governor's Office of Economic Development (GOED) — a change touching roughly 115 sections of Utah Code. The audit uses the office's current name throughout, even when describing conduct from before the rename.
Past leadership, current leadership
Ryan Starks served as the office's executive director from January 2023 to May 2025 — nearly the entire period the audit reviewed. The audit's findings on "past GOED leadership" cover that tenure without naming him directly. Starks left in May 2025 to lead the Economic Development Corporation of Utah.
Jefferson Moss took over as executive director (now Commissioner) in May 2025. The audit credits his tenure with hiring a chief compliance officer, beginning efforts to recover misspent and unspent funds, and revising GOED's grant selection processes.
New leadership also terminated a $3.2 million, 10-year Industrial Assistance Account contract with the Salt Lake Chamber Foundation — the same grant Utah Political Watch has reported Starks personally approved three days before announcing his departure, and on whose steering committee he sat. The audit's account of that termination, "due to contract timing concerns," independently confirms that earlier reporting from a second, separate government source.
Starks was not the office's first director to leave for a private or quasi-governmental role. Dan Hemmert — a former state senator — led the same office (then GOEO) from 2021 to 2022, then moved into private lobbying representing developers, before becoming executive director of the Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA), an authority his former lobbying clients do business with. This audit's findings are scoped specifically to the 2023-2025 window under Starks; Hemmert's tenure predates the period reviewed and isn't addressed by this report.
A grant that closed within 20 months
In January 2024, the GOED board approved a $2 million, non-matching Industrial Assistance Account grant to the Utah Beef Producers, intended to support a meat processing facility. GOED disbursed the full amount upfront. The business began operations without a full permit, engaged in improper dumping, and closed less than 20 months after receiving the grant.
According to the audit, GOED's own case file for the grant contained a single project report — an expenditure list submitted after the facility had already closed. The office learned of the closure through outside sources, not its own monitoring process. The state has since recovered roughly 11% of the original award, leaving close to $1.8 million unrecovered, though it retains an ownership interest in some of the infrastructure the grant funded.
How the audit connects this case to a wider pattern
The audit doesn't treat Utah Beef Producers as an isolated failure. It's presented as an example of what happens when the two structural gaps identified elsewhere in the report — no documented budget before funds go out, and no enforced final report before a grant closes — play out on an individual award. The same two failures show up separately in the audit's review of GOED's broader FY2025 pass-through activity, described below.
Reporting compliance collapsed, not improved
Auditors tracked how many Industrial Assistance Account grantees had documented annual or final reports on file, year by year:
Separately, in its review of GOED's 21 fiscal-year-2025 pass-through grants (totaling $39 million), the audit found GOED disbursed $3.8 million — 19% of that year's awardees — with no documented initial budget on file, and made final payments to two entities with no final report at all. Of 19 nonprofit grantees required to file financial reports with the State Auditor, only 5 were current; 14 were missing or out of date.
Three of the report's six recommendations go directly to leadership: document grant budgets before disbursing initial funds, ensure final reports meet statutory requirements before final funds go out, and require grantees to actually file the financial reports the state auditor is owed. A fourth asks GOED to build a structured review framework for IAA reporting specifically. GOED, under Commissioner Moss, formally accepted all six recommendations, with implementation timelines running through August 2027.
The rest of GOED's portfolio
The audit's findings are specific to pass-through and IAA funding — not GOED's full 42-program portfolio. In the same report, auditors partnered with Utah State University's Analytics Solutions Center to evaluate a separate GOED program, the Economic Development Tax Increment Financing (EDTIF) tax credit, which pays companies only after they've delivered on job and investment commitments. That analysis found EDTIF generated an audit-validated $3.20 in new state tax revenue for every $1 disbursed, with broader estimated returns — including supply-chain and spending effects — ranging from $5.39 to $7.29 per dollar, across the 70 companies studied.
What this would trigger in corporate America
None of what follows is a claim that anyone named in this report broke a specific law — no one described here has been charged with anything. It's a comparison of governance mechanisms: what these same fact patterns would typically set in motion at a publicly traded company, versus what actually happened at a state agency handling public money.
At a public company, an executive approving a benefit to an entity tied to their own next employer is the textbook definition of a related-party transaction — disclosed in advance to the audit committee under SEC Regulation S-K Item 404, not discovered after the fact. Discovery after the fact typically means termination for cause, forfeiture of severance, and clawback of unvested pay tied to that period.
What happened here: the grant was quietly canceled by the next administration. No clawback, no public accounting from the person who approved it.
This is the fact pattern that produces a "material weakness in internal controls" finding under Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404 — one of the most serious labels an external auditor can attach. It typically triggers a qualified or adverse audit opinion, and under Dodd-Frank's mandatory clawback rule, recovery of any executive incentive pay tied to the flawed period, regardless of individual fault.
What happened here: an audit finding, a set of recommendations, and an agency response letter. No mandatory recovery of anything.
Releasing full principal with no tranche structure, no covenants, and no active monitoring is the kind of lapse that draws an auditor finding of inadequate controls in a corporate lending or grant-making context — and usually costs the responsible finance officer their job.
What happened here: the state learned the business had closed the same way the public eventually did — after the fact, and not from its own process.
A board narrowing its own audit committee's independence immediately after that committee raised real findings would jeopardize a company's stock exchange listing under NYSE and Nasdaq standards, and draw swift action from proxy advisory firms.
What happened here: it passed the House 71-1, over the Auditor's own recorded objection, with no equivalent body positioned to intervene.
Corporate executives who mishandle shareholder money operate under personal certification requirements that carry criminal liability for false statements, mandatory clawback of pay tied to the failure, an audit committee with independence protected by listing standards, and a securities regulator that can bar someone from serving as an officer or director again. None of that architecture exists for a state office handling public money — accountability instead depends on whichever officials choose to act, case by case, with no automatic mechanism forcing money back or barring a return to public-facing work.
Graded by the collective rubric
| Power | C | The Industrial Assistance Account's structure gives the executive director wide discretion over awards, with the board's role advisory rather than binding — a design the audit doesn't fault directly, but one that concentrated the failures it found in a single office under a single director's oversight. |
|---|---|---|
| Transparency | D | Three consecutive years of incomplete reporting, ending at zero percent for FY2025, and annual reports that — per the audit — listed totals without naming recipients or outcomes as statute requires. |
| Financial accountability | D | Nearly $249 million moved with inconsistent documentation; a $2 million grant to a single recipient went undermonitored through a full business failure before the state noticed independently. |
| Environmental impact | N/A | Not addressed by this audit. |
| Community impact | C | No public funds were shown to be misused in the specific accounts this audit reviewed — the harm here is the state's own reduced ability to know whether its economic development spending is working, not a documented instance of money going to the wrong place. |
| Overall | D | A real, multi-year oversight failure with credible, documented steps toward a fix already underway — graded on what happened, not on whether the fix will hold. |
Common questions
- Does this audit say money was stolen or misused?
- Not in the specific accounts it reviewed for this report. It found GOED could not document how funds were used or whether they worked — a records and monitoring failure, not a finding of theft. A separate, earlier State Auditor report did find a specific pass-through grant was misused (between $1.8 million and $2.8 million, tied to the Manufacturing Extension Partnership program); this audit cites that case as evidence the risks it's describing are real, not hypothetical.
- Is this still happening?
- The audit describes both a past failure and a present-tense response. It credits current leadership, in place since May 2025, with real corrective steps — but its own data shows FY2025 reporting compliance at zero percent, the same year those changes began. Whether the fix is working is a question for the next audit, not this one.
- Who is responsible for the Industrial Assistance Account today?
- GOED's executive director — currently Jefferson Moss, titled Commissioner in the office's formal audit response — administers the account under state law. Ryan Starks held that role for nearly the entire period this audit reviewed.
- What has the Legislature done about this?
- In the same 2026 session, lawmakers passed H.B. 545, which added new IAA reporting language and formalized the GOED board's advisory role over IAA grants — but with no funding attached, and a legislative fiscal note finding it doesn't constitute a new program. The same bill separately narrowed the State Auditor's control over her own office's operating expenses. Full breakdown linked below.
Questions worth asking
- Ask GOED: is "Commissioner" now Jefferson Moss's official statutory title, or informal usage in the audit response — and if it's a real title change, when and how did it happen?
- Ask GOED or the Legislature: does the new receipt-and-verification requirement in §63G-6b-201 actually apply to Industrial Assistance Account grants, given the "incentive" exclusion in §63G-6b-101 — or does IAA remain outside that rule entirely?
- Ask GOED: what specifically happened to Utah Beef Producers' remaining infrastructure, and what is the current status of the state's ownership interest in it?
- Ask the 14 nonprofit grantees flagged as not current with the State Auditor: why are their financial reports missing or outdated, and when will they be filed?
Related on this docket
A case file on Dan Hemmert's earlier tenure leading this same office, and his later move to MIDA, is in progress and will be linked here once published.
Sources
- Office of the Legislative Auditor General, Report No. 2026-18, "A Systemic Performance Audit of the Governor's Office of Economic Development: A Review of Oversight and Outcomes," transmitted to the Utah Legislature September 15, 2026.
- Office of the Utah State Auditor, Report No. USU25SP, "Manufacturing Extension Partnership" Limited Review, July 29, 2025.
- GOED Agency Response Plan, signed by Commissioner Jeff Moss, August 21, 2026 — appended to OLAG Report 2026-18.
- Utah Political Watch (Bryan Schott), reporting on the Ryan Starks / Utah Rising Industrial Assistance Account grant, published September 3, 2025, updated December 2, 2025.
- H.B. 545, "Budgetary Modifications," 2026 General Session — for the legislative response, see the linked Bill-Tracker case file.