Lobbying violations were way up in 2009 because new regulations and a bad reputation is pushing lobbyists to drop the title thus triggering more than 1,400 lobbyists to de-register with the feds to avoid the stigma and additional paperwork.
According to a Huffington Post story, usually only a couple of hundred lobbyists leave the game each quarter. But Congress passed the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act in 2007 and doubled the amount a financial reporting each lobbying firm is required to submit each year.
Bush signed the bill into law, but when Obama was campaigning he called this transparency.
The downside is that in 2009 about 4,400 potential paperwork violations were filed. According to the Huffington Post, since 1996 the Secretary of the Senate referred just over 8,200 violations.
The law (referred to as “Helloga” by lobbying wonks) requires firms to file reports on expenses and contacts four times instead of twice a year, and it introduced a new requirement that firms and individual lobbyists file semiannual reports on political contributions. So, there’s a lot more paperwork to screw up.
It’s not just the paperwork, some of the lobbyists are trying to drop the title for something that sounds less evil – like “researcher.”
The Huffington Post reported that “two lobbyists named Larry Mitchell and Brien Bonneville de-registered at the end of 2009 and founded a new ‘non-lobbying entity’ called K Street Research. They figure they can do the same work as before without the ‘Scarlet L.’”
One can’t help but think about the “spirit of the law” regulating lobbyists. Just because someone doesn’t want to file the paperwork, but “can do the same work as before” and call themselves a researcher …
Read the Huffington Post story “Potential Lobbying Disclosure Violations Surged In 2009.”
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