Getting zinged by the auditors from the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office can be embarrassing for state agencies.

The more important outcomes can be: accountability and improvement in how the state is run. The 2018 audit of Oregon’s child welfare system is a great example.

As good as the auditors are, they only can do so many audits. Choosing which audits get done is a key decision. Legislators talked about that Thursday as Secretary of State Shemia Fagan and state auditors previewed their plans in the Joint Committee on Legislative Audits.

The plan includes a look at unemployment benefits, wildfire response, vaccine distribution, 911 response, Oregon’s mortgage interest deduction and more. Those are smart topics.

If anything, we wonder if it would be smarter to do many more. That would require more staff and expense.

Something cheaper that could be done would be for Fagan to try to make a splash with a news conference when audits note significant problems.

Of course, some people would call that grandstanding. The subject of the audit won’t like it one bit. Fagan has enough good sense to know when it is warranted.

Former Secretary of State Dennis Richardson did it with the 2018 child welfare audit. We can’t say it would have made any difference, but imagine if the same clamor was made every time auditors and other state staff warned about the problems modernizing the state’s delivery of unemployment benefits. We all know how that turned into a mess when the pandemic hit.