| Back in early 2008, Burnt Orange Report reported on the filing of campaign finance violations filed against Austin's Rep. Dawnna Dukes for failing to itemize tens of thousands of dollars in credit card expenditures. Last December, Dukes paid $2,800 in fines for failing to report the required information.
While the fine is paid, the reports remained uncorrected- but submitted those corrected reports for prior filing periods would automatically trigger up to $50,000 in new fines ($10,000 per report). As such, Dukes is saying she's going to skip on correcting the reports, even though a waiving or reduction of those fines is possible by the TEC as reported by Corrie MacLaggen at the Austin American-Statesman.
She said that her attempt to "be transparent and rectify" the issue became an "administrative nightmare."
"Even if you want to try to do the disclosure, there is a penalty regardless," said Dukes, adding that she plans to post the corrected reports on her Web site. However, she declined to release the corrected reports to the American-Statesman this week, saying they're not in a sendable format.
Sorrells said that state law, not commission policy, requires fines of up to $10,000 for certain late reports. The law was tweaked in 2007, limiting the types of reports that trigger that maximum fine, Sorrells said.
State law requires officials and candidates to report who gets paid with a campaign credit card so the public can see how officials or candidates are spending political donations. But many state officials didn't follow that law until the commission reminded them about it in 2007.
I don't understand Duke's statement that the corrected reports are not in a sendable format because the TEC filing software generates downloadable PDFs which could indeed be sent to the Statesman.
But this is a real catch-22 situation, where the law is not encouraging the right behavior.
Submitting the 2004 report triggered a $10,000 late fee, Dukes said. The commission waived that fee in February, according to agency documents.
Dukes said it would be impossible for her to know whether she could get any future late fees waived, so she has decided not to submit the other corrected reports. Paying $40,000 or more to submit the documents "is not fiscally prudent," she said.
Sorrells said that although filers can seek waivers for the late fines, "the commission cannot consider a waiver unless a report is filed."
And if a corrected report isn't filed... well, nothing happens at all it appears. It's an unfortunate situation as I agree no one would want to take the gamble of large fines, when they no longer are "legally" required to correct them, other than to solve the political question about what wasn't reported correctly. The issue would be effectively dead if those correct reports were released to the media for review or posted to a campaign website in lieu of going back to the Texas Ethics Commission. |
