A career spanning over 30 years…hired as a staff auditor, then an elected audit leader, and lastly an appointed audits director…in city, county, and state government.
Gary Blackmer was hired as a performance auditor in Portland Oregon in 1985 and his career advanced as performance auditing developed and spread to local governments throughout the country. Mentors, peers, and challenging audit experiences all contributed to his rich knowledge and professional judgment about performance auditing. His attention to the needs of the communities he represented became the framework for producing audits that changed agency operations for the benefit of the public.
He entered the 1991 non-partisan Multnomah County auditor race, defeating the incumbent. He served eight years in that post before running for Portland City Auditor where he served for ten years. After leaving the city, the newly elected Oregon Secretary of State hired him as the audits director where he led financial, performance, and IT auditors for six years before retiring.
During his career, he trained auditors on many different subjects critical to successful auditing. He was chosen to lead professional auditing associations in the northwest and nationally. The Comptroller General of the U.S. Government Accountability Office appointed him twice to the agency’s 15-member Domestic Working Group, as a local representative and then state representative. He wrote a column for the Local Government Auditing Quarterly for twenty years. Many of the Observation articles are based on those columns.
More recently, he published Good, Better, Best: A Guidebook for Performance Auditing which describes some methods for professionals.
He enjoys reading mysteries and always wished that someone had written stories featuring an auditor. He set his stories in the Portland Oregon area during the early 1990s.
He is married with two grown children and resides in Portland. His retirement has allowed him more time for flyfishing, reading, mentoring auditors, traveling, and finding many mysteries around him.
