Minnesota's license-plate-reader auditors are governed by the same departments they audit

Minnesota Statute 13.824 requires every police department running an automated license plate reader to arrange an independent audit every two years. The results go to the commissioner of administration and the Legislative Commission on Data Practices, and if an audit turns up a pattern of substantial noncompliance, the commissioner can order the cameras shut off. That is the entire enforcement mechanism the legislature built into the law: audit, or answer for it.

Of the roughly 120 Minnesota agencies on the state's own list of departments running license plate readers, 65 have never had a single audit. Not one, not ever, in the eleven years since the legislature wrote the requirement into law.

The agencies that do get audited are often audited by the people who run the auditor.

Two consortiums, the Minnesota Security Consortium (MNSec) and Local Government Information Systems (LOGIS), handle the plurality of Minnesota's ALPR audits between them. Both are membership organizations. Cities and counties pay to join, and in exchange they get IT security services, one of which is the ALPR audit the state requires. Both are also governed by boards seated with representatives from those same member cities. MNSec's board includes Robert James, the City of Woodbury's ICT director. Woodbury Public Safety hires MNSec to audit its own ALPR program, and the most recent report, filed this year, recorded no findings. LOGIS runs the same model. Its own FAQ describes the board that controls it as "made up of a variety of member city and county professionals, from police chiefs to city managers to finance directors," one seat per member, governing the organization that then bills those same members to audit their own police departments.

Minn. Stat. 13.824 never defines "independent." It uses the word once and moves on. That gap is worth measuring against how the audit profession actually handles the question, not GAAP, which governs financial statements, but the standards that govern auditors themselves. The federal Government Auditing Standards, known as the Yellow Book, require an audit organization to be free from personal and external impairments to independence, organizationally independent, and clear of any role in the management decisions of the entity it audits. A board seat at the firm hired to audit your own department is precisely the relationship that standard exists to catch. Minnesota's law has no equivalent, so nothing MNSec or LOGIS does is illegal. It is just not independent by any definition the accounting profession recognizes, and the legislature never wrote one of its own.

Lynn Lembcke Consulting, a private auditor who has filed more Minnesota ALPR audits than anyone else FinePrint tracks, points at a related problem. Several of the individual auditors doing this work, not only the consortiums, carry law enforcement backgrounds themselves. Independence here is not only a governance-chart question.

This is landing at a bad moment for the technology it is supposed to police. Automated license plate readers, mostly Flock Safety's, have drawn the kind of national backlash that used to live in privacy-conference panels. More than 50 cities and counties canceled Flock contracts in 2026 alone, after reporting showed ICE searching local camera networks that state and local policy was supposed to keep off limits. Evanston found seven such searches on its own database despite an Illinois law banning data sharing with ICE. Minnesota wrote its ALPR audit requirement in 2015, ahead of most of that, as close to a first attempt as the state has made to put a check on a genuinely new kind of government surveillance: continuous, suspicionless collection of everyone's movements, not just people under investigation. The audit was supposed to be that check. Right now it is either not happening, or it is being run by the people it is supposed to be checking.

If your department's ALPR audit was conducted by an organization your chief, IT director, or city manager helps govern, or by an auditor sharing staff or leadership with the agency, send it to tips@fineprint.report.

Source: MNSec Board of Directors (mnsec.org/board); City of Woodbury 2026 ALPR audit, LRL 260248; Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension list of agencies using LPRs; LOGIS FAQ (logismn.gov/faq); Minn. Stat. 13.824; U.S. GAO Government Auditing Standards (Yellow Book).