NC auditor presents lawmakers with options for cutting vacant state jobs
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Auditor Boliek presented DAVE report detailing 8,800 vacancies and $1.04B lapsed pay.
- Report lists nine potential criteria for cutting vacant jobs.
- Governor’s office disputed the $1.04B tally; legislature retains power to cut jobs.
State Auditor Dave Boliek on Thursday presented lawmakers with a suite of options for cutting government jobs that have been vacant for six months or longer.
In a nearly 700-page report created by his new self-titled government efficiency division, Boliek, a Republican, provided extensive details on the 8,800 long-term vacancies that he says have produced $1.04 billion in lapsed salary dollars.
The report lists nine potential criteria for cutting vacant jobs, ranging from eliminating positions that have been vacant for over five years to eliminating all positions that agencies keep purposefully vacant for funding reasons.
“It’s giving legislators, policymakers and the General Assembly and for that matter, members of the executive branch, a starting point,” Boliek told reporters Thursday evening.
The report did not endorse a specific option for cutting jobs, but Boliek said eliminating vacancies of five years or longer would be a good place to start.
“I do think there are some low-hanging fruit spots,” he said. “Positions that have been open for five years? Yeah, we can start with that.”
The State Employees Association of North Carolina has cautioned against sweeping cuts, with Executive Director Ardis Watkins telling legislative leaders in a letter on Thursday that they should focus on raising wages and passing a state budget.
“When delays occur, when systems fail, or when services fall short, it is state employees who are blamed — publicly and loudly — while the policies that created these conditions go unexamined,” she wrote. “Lawmakers express shock when something goes wrong, even as the workforce is thinned, underpaid, and constrained from hiring. These outcomes are not surprises; they are the predictable results of chronic neglect.”
Boliek stressed that his intention was not to solely recommend cutting jobs, but to also recommend increased salaries for some hard-to-fill positions.
“There are places where we need to reinvest, where we can get a return on investment: nursing, other health care professionals ... correction officials,” he said.
Boliek released a pared-down version of the lapsed salary report last month, but promised to provide a more thorough analysis later with responses from the affected agencies.
Last week, Gov. Josh Stein’s office accused Boliek of making “significant inaccuracies” in finding the state had generated over $1 billion in lapsed salary dollars from vacant state agency positions.
In a letter to Boliek, Stein’s chief of staff, Seth Dearmin, said the topline figure overcounted the total impact of long-term vacancies by hundreds of millions of dollars by improperly including unfunded and federally funded positions in the count.
Boliek defended his findings on Thursday, saying that the $1.04 billion topline was not misleading and “gives a true picture of the type of economies of scale that occur when you have a recurring lapsed salary issue across state government.”
“... If agencies have difficulty filling open full-time positions, how realistic is it to believe that they will be able to quickly — on a dime — fill placeholder positions?” he said.
Thursday’s report is the product of the auditor’s new Division of Accountability, Value and Efficiency (DAVE), which the legislature created last year and tasked with recommending job cuts.
Democrats largely objected to DAVE’s creation, with some making comparisons to DOGE, the new U.S. agency formerly led by billionaire Elon Musk that was responsible for severe cuts to the federal bureaucracy.
Unlike DOGE, DAVE cannot eliminate jobs itself. That responsibility still lies with the General Assembly, which has still not passed a comprehensive state budget for the current fiscal year as House and Senate Republicans remain at a stalemate over tax policy.
This story was originally published January 15, 2026 at 6:49 PM.
