Legislation may undo e-Filing gains

An online filing system developed two years ago by the McDonnell administration moved lobbyist registrations and disclosures into the electronic era. Today, more than 80 percent of lobbyists register online, saving taxpayer administrative costs and speeding public disclosure.

Those gains could be lost, however, as state officials grapple with implementing ethics legislation passed earlier this year by the General Assembly.

The law's most ambitious feature has nothing to do with lobbyists. Rather, the law would make it possible by 2015 for anyone to go online and view the personal financial disclosures of an estimated 25,000 public officials. This universe includes all legislators, judges, high ranking state employees, gubernatorial appointees, local elected officials and local appointees. The law creates a daunting administrative challenge of centralizing the collection of these forms, which had been due annually but will now be filed twice a year.

The bill also changes the way an estimated 2,200 lobbyist registration and annual disclosure forms are handled. The final version of the legislation split lobbyist filings between two agencies -- registrations will continue to be filed with the Secretary of the Commonwealth in the executive branch and disclosure reports will be filed with the newly created Ethics Commission in the legislative branch.

The ethics bill contained no funding for the legislative branch to develop an online filing system for lobbyist disclosures, similar to the one that the McDonnell administration launched in 2012. It's unclear if the executive and legislative branches could share the application and integrate their computer systems.

If no solution is found, the number of e-filed lobbyist disclosures -- which are intended to provide a public accounting of what lobbyists did, how much they spent and who they entertained -- would drop to zero by late 2015.

As HB1211 moved through the General Assembly, a "fiscal impact" statement attached to the bill focused on the possible additional costs to incarcerate public officials who would be convicted of ethics violations. Legislators were told the costs of the legislation would be zero.

By the end of session, a revised fiscal impact statement took into account the administrative cost, which as estimated at $300,000 a year. That figure did not consider possible costs associated with requirements to create and maintain a publicly searchable database. Such costs -- the statement said -- "are not known at this time."

April 11, 2014

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