When state Sen. Kurt Schaefer was a staff attorney for Missouri's Natural Resources department, he helped form the Enforcement Review Board so agency directors could trade information.
"Each program at the Department of Natural Resources has an enforcement division," he explained. "One thing that I found out was, even though each one of those programs in enforcement did a very good job, they never sat down together.
"You never got the directors ... to sit down and compare notes on how they move enforcement cases forward, and how many letters they send out to potential permittees" or other issues that might be common to their work.
So, Schaefer, R-Columbia, said Thursday, helping new Missouri Auditor Tom Schweich get the authority to do a one-time comparison audit of major state agencies seems like the same kind of idea - an idea the Senate sent to the House on Thursday on a 34-0 vote.