A freeze to her office’s budget contained in the state Senate’s proposed fiscal 2024 spending plan reflects “clear retaliation” by the Senate president and the upper chamber’s leadership in response to an ongoing audit of their operations, State Auditor Diana DiZoglio says.

According to DiZoglio, Senate President Karen Spilka and other legislative leaders have responded to her announcement that she’s conducting an audit of the state Legislature by deliberately flatlining the budget for the Office of the State Auditor for the next year instead of increasing it at a rate seen by other state agencies.

“It is clear retaliation by the Senate president and her leadership team in a very unfortunate attempt to coerce and control and manipulate the situation,” she told WBZ’s Jon Keller for his Sunday politics segment.

“To see the pushback from the Senate leadership team in this way is incredibly unfortunate and unacceptable,” she said.

As the Senate’s budget was written at release, from fiscal 2023 to fiscal 2024, the Attorney General’s Office would see a 10% funding increase, going from about $64 million to $70 million; the Treasurer an 8% increase, from about $149 million to $161 million; and the Secretary of State a 6% increase, from about $33 million to $35 million.

The auditor’s office was slated for an extra $315,155 on top of last fiscal year’s $22 million budget, or about 1% more. All of that increase, according to the auditor, was actually approved under the previous administration.

DiZoglio said it’s not just her and her staff who suffer when the Legislature plays political games with state agency funding, but every taxpaying resident.

“We bring back millions of dollars in savings to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts by identifying waste, fraud, and abuse through state agencies. Cutting our budget through level funding, for example, that doesn’t keep up with cost of living or considerations for inflation, it could mean less audits, it could mean layoffs, it could mean less work gets done to prevent that waste, fraud and abuse,” she said.

Lawmakers in both the House and the Senate have maintained that DiZoglio lacks the constitutional authority to audit a separate branch of government which is tasked with creating its own rules of conduct. Both chambers are audited annually by outside agencies, legislative leaders have said.

A spokesman for the Senate Ways and Means, in announcing their budget, said that “hundreds” of state accounts were level funded, but DiZoglio’s office, which did see that more than $300,000 increase, was not among them.

“This increased funding was allocated for advanced audit capacity involving cyber security, data integrity, data access, and overall system operations,” the spokesperson said.

DiZoglio, though, seems to think it’s just not enough.

“We need to be able to keep up with what state agencies need, and keep up with the times, and certainly we need the resources to be able to do our jobs,” the auditor said.

The Office of the Senate President did not return a request for comment on DiZoglio’s assertions.