Vermont lawmakers are advancing a bill that would allow political candidates to go unpunished this year if they don’t file a legally mandated financial disclosure form.

At the same time, the state commission tasked with holding late filers accountable by levying fines says it does not have enough staff to do that work, anyway. 

Lawmakers created the fines two years ago to compel candidates for certain offices to turn in reports providing information about their employer, their spouses’ work, stocks and investment income and boards they’re on that could create conflicts of interest. The forms, which are separate from reports detailing campaign fundraising, must be filed by candidates for statewide office, the Legislature and county offices such as sheriffs.

Enforcement of the fines was set to start this year. But under a bill, S.298, that passed the House on Thursday, candidates would not face any penalties until at least 2027.

That means there could be less information available to voters ahead of this year’s primary and general elections about where some candidates get their income from.

“This is, frankly, embarrassing,” Lauren Hibbert, Vermont’s deputy secretary of state, told the Vermont House committee that drafted the change late last month.

At issue are two provisions the House added into S.298, which cleared the Senate in March. The Senate’s version proposed incorporating some existing federal-level voter protections into state law, and would allow candidates to use campaign funds for security expenses. It did not include anything about financial disclosures.

House lawmakers also approved voter security measures, but tacked on a new section suspending fines, until the end of next May, for late financial disclosures. Laid out in a sweeping state and municipal ethics reform law from 2024, those penalties are $10 a day after the form has been overdue after at least five days, up to $1,000.

The House Government Operations and Military Affairs Committee passed the revised bill with no votes against it, and no House members spoke up against it on the floor. The bill now heads back to the Senate for a review of the House’s changes. 

Rep. Chea Waters Evans, D-Charlotte, is the ranking member on the government operations panel. She said in an interview the committee didn’t want candidates to be punished for failing to fill out the form when it is unclear currently how to access it.

That’s because of a standoff between the Vermont State Ethics Commission and the Vermont Secretary of State’s Office, she said, over who should take the lead on the form’s rollout and should field questions about what information gets disclosed on it. As of Friday, an updated version of the form was not online — and the websites of the ethics commission and the secretary of state each refer users to the other for a copy. 

Meanwhile, Waters Evans said, the window candidates have to file financial disclosure forms this year, as well as formally declare that they’re running for office, opened last week. The window closes on May 28, at least for major party candidates.

“It doesn’t seem fair or right to candidates to charge them for not complying with something when we, ourselves, have not been able to make it available to them,” she said.

According to the 2024 ethics law, Act 171, financial disclosure forms should be “created and maintained” by the State Ethics Commission. That was a change from the law before that, which said only that the form should be “prepared” by the commission. 

Paul Erlbaum, the ethics commission’s chair, told lawmakers the commission has created a version of this year’s form and sent it to the Secretary of State’s Office, which the commission thinks should then distribute the form to candidates and offer help filling it out. But Hibbert, the deputy secretary of state, rejected that notion, telling lawmakers the letter of the law makes it “very clear” the commission should take the lead.

The House version of S.298 attempts to clarify that dispute, according to Waters Evans.

The bill stipulates that the ethics commission provide resources to candidates and answer questions over email and phone about the disclosure form, make the form available on its website and prepare a list of frequently asked questions about it. 

The ethics commission has pushed back hard against that measure because it does not have enough staff to carry out what it sees as new responsibilities, Erlbaum said. In fact, he said, even if lawmakers wanted to enforce the fines this year as planned, the commission wouldn’t be able to enforce them because it is so understaffed. 

He noted that the commission stopped providing guidance to municipalities on how to handle ethics complaints at the local level, as it was authorized to do under the 2024 law. The reason, again, is a lack of staff, Erlbaum said. Currently, the commission has two employees: a part-time executive director and a part-time administrative assistant.

The commission asked legislators to send it funding in the state budget for the upcoming fiscal year, which starts in July, for two additional positions. Gov. Phil Scott’s budget proposal did not include any new positions for the panel. 

The House version of the budget, which passed in March, included one new ethics commission position tied to municipal-level work. The Senate, however, took that position out in its budget proposal, approved last week. The budget bill, H.951, is now being considered by a committee of conference, where House and Senate budget writers are hashing out their differences, including over the ethics job.

For its part, the Secretary of State’s office says it doesn’t have enough staff to take the lead on the financial disclosure forms, either. Moreover, Hibbert said last month, it’s inappropriate for questions about conflicts of interest to be under the jurisdiction of a statewide officer who is affiliated with a political party, as the secretary of state is.

The fact that disclosure forms haven’t yet been made available has drawn criticism from the heads of Vermont’s two largest political parties. Suspending enforcement of the disclosure requirements “is not in the best interest of Vermont voters,” May Hanlon, executive director of the Vermont Democratic Party, told lawmakers last month.

The chair of the Vermont Republican Party, Paul Dame, took it a step further, calling for the ethics commission’s executive director, Christina Sivret, to be fired over the fact the commission had not made the form publicly available on its own. He made the comments in an April 23 press release.

Campaign for Vermont, an advocacy group that focuses on government transparency, said in its own press release last week that Dame’s push for Sivret’s firing was excessive — but urged legislators to send the ethics commission more staff. 

“You can’t demand more complex forms, real‑time candidate support and tougher enforcement from an office with two part-time staff, then attack them for saying they don’t have the capacity to do it,” said Ben Kinsley, Campaign for Vermont’s executive director. “If we want ethics and oversight to mean something in Vermont, we have to fund the folks responsible for carrying that forward.”