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PINE BELT, Miss. (WDAM) – State Auditor Shad White vows that for the next four years, he will continue to do what he believes his office does best.

“My job is to protect your money,” White said.

For White, that has meant fighting to get back millions of dollars that landed in the wrong hands.

“If you look back at the past five years, my office has recovered more in the last five years than any other five-year period in the history of the state auditor’s office,” White said. “We’ve recovered about $70 million.”

White said he’s taking his fight against public corruption into the upcoming legislative session. He said he would push to bring a federal law to the state level.

“A ‘Whistle Blower Reward Bill,’” White said. “The idea here is if you are a private citizen, and you come forward with information to my office, you believe that you’ve seen evidence of somebody in government stealing money, or somebody in government stealing your property, taxpayer property, and we investigate based on your tip, and you are right, and we recover some money, you should be eligible to receive a percentage of what we recover.”

White said another potential bill is one he hopes will tweak the “Open Meetings Act” and make it stronger.

“Let’s say you are a board of supervisors in a county, and you go off and you hold an illegal secret meeting that violates the Open Meetings Act,” White said. “You may have been found to have done something illegal, but the decision that you make in that secret meeting still stand, which is kind of crazy.”

White said the law is supposed to work where decisions made in a secret meeting should be null and void.

“You should have to go back in public and you should have to have the debate and vote out in the open,” White said.

The state auditor’s priorities also are focused on education.

White said every three years, $1.5 billion to $2 billion is spent at universities, which leads to a question: Does the state have degree programs that prepare students to get jobs in Mississippi, or are we losing our students to other states?

“I’m going to ask the Legislature to set up a committee of economist workforce experts, key thinkers in higher education, get together and make a plan, so we can invest our money in the degree areas that are really giving us a good bang for our buck as a taxpayer,” White said.

The high school military program, Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, is something White said he thinks the state should consider. White said in Jackson, students in JROTC have a 100 percent graduation rate, and kids score three points higher on the American College Testing exam.

“I’m going to call on the Legislature to say for any student who graduates from a JROTC military program in Mississippi, they get free community college at the end of it,” White said.

White said he believes in using taxpayer’s dollars to get a good return on investment. He said turning these ideas into law would put Mississippi at an advantage.