By Daniel Ducassi, FloridaBulldog.org
Florida Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia has been touring the state touting the importance of fiscal transparency and accountability, but his own agency has been violating a key fiscal transparency law that helps the public hold the government accountable.
A Florida Bulldog analysis revealed 200 Department of Financial Services (DFS) contracts that are missing public documentation required by the Transparency Florida Act. The value of the contracts missing documentation amounts to more than $342 million. The law requires agencies to post copies of all contracts within 30 days to the Florida Accountability Contract Tracking System (FACTS), a database operated by the Department of Financial Services itself.
But the department that is supposed to assure transparency has neglected that duty for years, continuing into the tenure of Ingoglia, whom Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed to the post in July 2025. Ingoglia announced last September that he’s running for a full four-year term this year.
Since his appointment as CFO, Ingoglia has launched his “Florida Agency for Fiscal Oversight” (FAFO) campaign to audit local government spending. Ingoglia has pushed for legislation to permanently establish FAFO within his department and even require counties to follow the same contract posting requirements his own agency has not followed.
That legislation, however, appears all but dead, having failed to get a committee hearing in either chamber as the legislative session nears its end. Lawmakers have instead moved to take on a greater fiscal oversight role themselves, even as they have ignored the DeSantis administration’s violations of the Transparency Florida Act.
Ingoglia’s office has also been silent about $6 billion in DeSantis administration “emergency” contracts that are also missing legally required documentation.
When asked about what Ingoglia was doing to remedy his agency’s longstanding violations of the Transparency Florida Act, DFS spokesperson Sydney Booker responded as if there was nothing systemic to fix. And while she offered to provide documentation for a specific example referenced in a Florida Bulldog inquiry, the offer underscores the fact that the documents are not where they’re legally required to be.
Booker, who is paid $114,000 a year to serve as the department’s communications director, wrote in an email that the example of one of the 200 CFO contracts with missing documentation was a purchase order, which she asserted “is different from a contract.”
TWISTING LAW TO JUSTIFY BREAKING LAW
The argument is similar to the DeSantis administration’s defense of its failure to post more than 700 contracts to FACTS.
But the Transparency Florida Act makes no such distinction between a “purchase order” and a “contract.” In fact, the law itself explicitly defines a purchase order as a contract.
“‘Contract’ means a written agreement or purchase order issued for the purchase of goods or services or a written agreement for the receipt of state or federal financial assistance,” the act says.
The law further states that agencies are required to publish to the database “electronic copies of the contract and procurement documents that have been redacted to exclude confidential or exempt information.”
Yet Florida Bulldog discovered 200 DFS purchase orders, each worth more than $500,000, that have no supporting documentation uploaded into the state database. The total value of these purchase orders is more than $342 million. Most of these contracts are for consulting services and software subscriptions, though some contracts are also for vehicles.
The lack of documentation has continued since long after Ingoglia took office in July. For example, DFS entered into a $1.8-million contract with a Georgia-based consulting company in December as part of an effort to replace the state’s Fire College Department of Insurance Continuing Education system, according to state records. But the entry in the state’s database for that contract contains no documents for the public to look at.
In another example, DFS awarded a $3.6-million contract to a major accounting and consulting firm in December, according to state records, yet the documents for that contract are also missing from the state’s database.
Without the contracts themselves, details about how the department spent these hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars are unavailable for public inspection. That makes it difficult, if not impossible, to scrutinize the terms to see if taxpayers got a good deal or got ripped off. It also makes it difficult to assess whether the information in the state database is even accurate.
Ingoglia’s whole political brand as he runs for a full term as CFO has been built around criticizing profligate government spending, titling his political committee Government Gone Wild PAC and using the moniker “GovGoneWild” on the social media platform X.
INGOGLIA GONE MISSING
Ingoglia, whose annual salary is $140,000, said in a January press conference that his attacks on local government spending aren’t meant to be punishment.
“It’s about accountability,” Ingoglia said. “It’s about transparency. And most importantly, it’s about knowledge. It’s about knowing what your government is actually doing with your money.”
But his own agency has deprived the public of knowledge about what exactly the government is doing with taxpayer money, repeatedly violating the state’s fiscal transparency law designed to enable the public to hold officials accountable for government spending.
DFS is not alone in violating the Transparency Florida Act. Ingoglia has ignored the DeSantis administration’s missing documentation for hundreds of contracts worth billions of dollars. Despite the widespread lack of compliance, Ingoglia has pushed legislation that would require counties to post their contracts to the state’s database.
DFS spokeswoman Booker did not respond to questions about why the CFO is ignoring the DeSantis administration’s systemic, yearslong violations of the Transparency Florida Act. She also didn’t answer a question about what influence Ingoglia’s desire to secure the endorsement of Gov. DeSantis had on the CFO’s silence.
Ingoglia touted his endorsement by DeSantis in December, posting a video of the governor on social media stating that, “We’ve never had anybody in state government who’s been such a bulldog in favor of the taxpayers.”
Booker also left unanswered a question about what influence a $100,000 donation to Friends of Blaise Ingoglia from Miami’s CDR Enterprises, one of the largest beneficiaries of the hidden contracts, had on the CFO’s silence.
State records show the DeSantis administration gave more than $537 million in no-bid emergency contracts to companies associated with CDR Enterprises, led by major DeSantis donors and close political allies of the governor, Carlos Duart and Tina Vidal-Duart.
Despite the CFO’s lack of oversight of the DeSantis administration’s hidden contracts – and his own department’s violations – there’s more evidence of actual fraud associated with some of those hidden contracts than the CFO himself has uncovered with his FAFO audits of local governments.
For example, the DeSantis administration in 2020 gave an $11-million COVID-19 testing contract to a phony lab testing company run by a known fraudster, with DeSantis staff concluding privately they’d been tricked by misrepresentations about the company’s qualifications. Nearly six years later, the administration still hasn’t publicly posted the contract, or the amended contract it signed with the company after finding out they’d been lied to.
The CFO has broad power under state law to investigate government financial practices, a power he has wielded to compel disclosures by local governments. But there’s no indication Ingoglia has considered using that power to force the DeSantis administration to turn over documents for the hundreds of contracts the administration has hidden from public view. Booker, his spokesperson, would not even respond to a question about whether the CFO has raised the issue of the illegally hidden contracts with the governor’s office.
“I am done watching taxpayers get screwed by governments gone wild,” Ingoglia said in his announcement of his CFO campaign. But after watching the state hide billions of dollars in contracts – including his own agency – Ingoglia has done nothing about it.
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