Great Moments in Campaign Finance Disclosure

The Financial Services Roundtable PAC has a thorough explanation for why they made a mistake on a 2012 filing. Well, except for one small thing - see if you can spot it:

What Happened:  Schedule B supporting Line 23 of the 
2012 August Monthly Report disclosed four contributions 
to candidates for the 2012 Primary election.  Unknown to 
us, New York had changed their primary date from Sep 11 
to Jun 26 and two contributions were made after the new 
date had past.  The other two were as a result of error on 
our part as we had selected Primary instead of General on 
the disbursements.  

What Should Have Happened:  The disbursements should 
have been made during the correct election period, i.e., 
general 2012.    

What We Did To Correct Report:  Since this error was discovered 
more than 60 days after the contributions were received we 
have contacted all four of the candidate committee treasurers 
via letter and requested refunds of the impermissible contributions.  
As we receive the refunds they will be reflected on the monthly 
FEC reports.

Sneaky New York, moving its primary like that.

Think it takes you awhile to reconcile those outstanding checks? Try the Cubic Corp. PAC’s filing covering April 2013, in which it voids a $1,000 check first issued to then-Rep. Ernest Istook, R-Okla., on July 8, 2003.

In which the Democratic Party of Illinois pays its travel bills several months late.

Pat Toomey’s leadership PAC doesn’t always pay to use private aircraft, but when it does, it pays N-35727 Inc. Which seems to fly back and forth from Allentown to Indiana, Pa., and sometimes to Washington D.C.

From the Friends of Liberty for Jessica:

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CORRECTION- The candidate made a commitment of up to $15,000 to the 
campaign, but the money was never put into the campaign checking account.
The candidate used a personal credit card to purchase items for the campaign
and forgave those charges to thier personal credit card.

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The Washoe County Republican Party’s federal account would like to be closed. It would really like to be closed, having filed four termination reports this year.

But the interesting thing is why it ever existed in the first place. County parties do have federal accounts, but this one was created last summer and specifically said that it was not affiliated with the state party. That’s because the state party was controlled by Ron Paul supporters, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee and Romney campaign did not want to funnel money for Nevada races through the state party. So they sent money to Washoe County instead.

Its 2012 duties fulfilled, the county party has no need for its federal account. Or rather, outsiders have no need for it.

From the Delaware Democratic State Committee:

Schedule H3 transfers from the account named 
Delaware Democratic Party - CoorCamp N is in fact 
a non-federal account of the committee.  Evidently 
the number of characters allowed in our filing software 
is less than the number of characters in the name of 
the account so the committee will abbreviate it in 
future filings to clearly identify it as a non-federal account.

The Andy Schmookler for Congress committee bought a license for software to file its reports. That license expired. Then it needed to amend its reports:

I understand the normal procedure for clarifying 
information previously reported to the FEC is to amend 
the report in question. However, the Andy Schmookler 
for Congress committee used proprietary campaign 
finance software to generate and file our reports in 2012. 
In the intervening months our license to use the software 
expired and our data was removed from the company's 
servers. Reactivating our license would have posed a 
financial cost we did not believe necessary nor intended 
by the RFAI. Since no fundamental changes to the report 
in question were necessary, such as might change the 
amount of money received or disbursed, we chose instead 
to provide the information requested via Form 99.

Way to own it, guys.

TECHNICAL LIMITATIONS DO NOT CURRENTLY ALLOW 
US TO FILE AMENDED 24 HOUR REPORTS which delete 
or change  items contained in the reports as originally filed.

See if you can read between the lines of this submission by the Visclosky for Congress committee:

After an internal audit, the Visclosky for Congress campaign
committee is unable to verify the payee or purpose for the 
following cash disbursements: $2,000 on 7/2/2008, $3,000 
on 8/5/2008, $2,000 on 9/3/2008, $1,000 on 10/8/2008, 
$2,000 on 10/15/2008, $2,000 on 10/27/2008, $2,000 on 
11/3/2008 and $2,000 on 11/18/2008. The campaign 
committee has inadequate information to determine whether 
the payments were authorized. The payments were in the 
form of checks made out to cash and were signed and 
endorsed by Chuck Brimmer, a former campaign aide.