Texas agency that oversees campaign finance needs clean-up

The state agency responsible for making sure Texas political candidates, state officers, lobbyists and others comply with campaign finance law could use some help from the Legislature in the upcoming session to do its job more effectively.

That’s the main takeaway from a lengthy review of the Texas Ethics Commission by the state’s Sunset Advisory Commission staff, who issued a report on the agency last month.

Specifically, lawmakers should clean up the “numerous requirements and layers upon layers of exemptions” that make “compliance challenging for the regulated community and enforcement difficult” for the TEC, the staff report states.

We urge the Sunset commission to approve the recommendations made by the staff in the report, and send them on to the Legislature for action. The work of the ethics agency, established through a constitutional amendment in 1991, is vital to ensure transparency behind the millions of dollars donated to campaigns every year, and lawmakers must champion it.

Far from calling for widespread ethics reform, which the Legislature has failed to pass in more than a decade, the Sunset staff is simply recommending commonsense tweaks to the agency’s enabling statute to allow for a more efficient process.

Doing so would amend the “complicated, outdated, and unclear statute” that “hinders meaningful disclosure, strains TEC’s limited resources, and burdens filers,” according to the staff report.

For example, innocent filing errors or submitting required forms even minutes after deadlines are minor violations that nonetheless trigger a confusing administrative process and often result in civil penalties. Another example is that the statute still requires the TEC to send late notices and other documents via mail, sometimes registered or certified, when email would make better sense.

“Receiving a notice by first-class mail can take up to five days, during which time the penalty could have increased by up to $500″ for a late filing, the staff report noted. Another recommendation: the Legislature should allow the TEC to redirect unspent funds in its budget for other purposes to its on-going technology needs.

J.R. Johnson, executive director of the TEC, applauded the Sunset staff’s “thorough and thoughtful” work in a Dec. 2 letter. He said he welcomed the proposed clean-up of the agency’s regulations so that it can “accomplish its mission” more successfully. The Sunset commission and lawmakers should take note that the agency leadership stands ready to implement changes.

The admirable mission of the TEC is needed now more than ever. There are “historic levels of money pouring into elections and few limits on campaign contributions and expenditures,” the Sunset staff noted. The public deserves a TEC unencumbered by chasing after minor filing mistakes and outdated processes so that it can focus on the more ethically questionable activities of political candidates, office holders, lobbyists and others.

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