by Cassandra LaRussa

Only 63% of information disclosed on lobbying reports were "properly reported and supported," according to a new Government Accountability Office audit. The March 2012 report surveyed lobbyist compliance with federal reporting requirements during 2011. According to the report, the major reasons for inaccurate disclosure reports included confusion regarding the definition of “lobbying activities” and the definitions of “covered positions.”

Although the majority of lobbyists surveyed indicated that lobbying reporting (LD-2) disclosure requirements were overall “easy” or “somewhat easy” to meet, some lobbyists interviewed indicated that they “were not sure when research and support activities become lobbying activities and therefore needed to be disclosed.” Others described confusion “as to whether congressional interns were considered covered positions and therefore need to be disclosed.” At least 11% of lobbyists in the study did not disclose previously held covered positions.

After the audit, 17 lobbying firms planned to amend and resubmit their LD-2 forms.

GAO reviewed a random sample of 100 LD-2 Forms, which lobbyists must file according to the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007. After examining the LD-2 forms, GAO asked lobbyists to verify the reported information by providing supporting documents.

Although lobbyists are not required to keep this documentation on file, all lobbyists complied with the request and provided documents to support 93% of the disclosure reports. Last year, lobbyists selected for review were able to support 97% of their reports. Reasons for not providing supporting documentation included a lack of recordkeeping and situations in which lobbyists over-reported, and did not actually lobby during the time period in question.

The GAO study also looked at LD-203 forms, in which lobbyists disclose their federal campaign contributions. Only 86% of lobbyists in the study who were required to file an LD-203 actually did so. At least 4% omitted one or more political contributions that should have been reported.

There has only been one enforcement case brought by the Department of Justice since the enactment of the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007. The GAO indicated that the US Attorney’s Office hired a new staff member in September 2010 specifically to handle lobbying compliance matters and developed a “top-ten list of noncompliant lobbyists” for closer investigation.

Photo credit [F]oxymoron

The Washington Post reported yesterday on new lobbyist regulations being proposed by the American League of Lobbyists. According to the report, ALL recommends eliminating the 20 percent loophole for lobbyists for hire. That would mean powerful stealth lobbyists like Tom Daschle, Newt Gingrich and Jon Corzine would have to register. ALL’s proposal would reduce the size of the loophole for in-house lobbyists, but just barely. It would allow lobbyists who work in-house to fly under the radar by claiming they spent less than 15 percent of their time lobbying. Sunlight has been advocating closing the 20 percent loophole for all lobbyists since before it was cool.

Sunlight’s position is simple. If you lobby, and you are paid to lobby, you should register to lobby. Twenty percent, fifteen percent, in house or not, it makes no difference.

Any carve out will be exploited, giving power players a way to hide their activities. Take Chris Dodd. The head of the Motion Picture Association of America is a former powerful senator who undoubtedly has the private numbers of many current members of Congress programmed into his cell phone. He’s not registered now, and there is no reason to think he would register simply because the threshold was lowered from 20 to 15 percent. Yet he has far more access and far more power than I, an outside lobbyist consultant to Sunlight, or the vast majority of lobbyists-for-hire could hope to have. Why give him a pass?

ALL is not the only group with a proposal to reform lobbying. The American Bar Association has a set of recommendations (that includes eliminating the 20 percent loophole, among other things), as of course, does Sunlight. Lobbying reform legislation has been introduced in Congress, and the President continues to talk about the issue. With all of the suggestions, ideas and competing (and overlapping) proposals, the time is ripe for Congress to take the issue of lobbying reform seriously. A start would be to hold hearings so that advocates could fully explain their positions and members of Congress could start to build a record and build a consensus for meaningful reform.

Today NPR's Planet Money team aired a story about disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s legal lobbying activities (as few of those as there may have been), highlighting how problematic even currently legal lobbying practices are. Also today, the New York Times pointed out some of the huge loopholes in current lobbying law -- Newt Gingrich, for example, isn’t actually a lobbyist, he just spends lots of his time talking to lawmakers about how policy should be made. Y’know, as a historian.

The powerful (and corrupting, as we saw with Abramoff) influence of special interest money in politics can be extremely hard to follow, but better lobbying laws could change that. Lobbying activity is the most tangible means to measure the money and effort that powerful interests are spending to influence lawmakers.

Closing the loopholes that let “historians” like Newt Gingrich act as stealth lobbyists and creating real-time, online disclosure about just who lobbyists are meeting with and what they’re talking about would be a powerful first step to shining a light on who’s actually influencing our lawmakers.

How do we fix it? A good first step, as Daniel wrote the other day, is the Lobbying Disclosure Enhancement Act, introduced by Rep. Quigley. The bill needs your help to get more support in Congress. You can write to your rep right from OpenCongress.org to ask them to co-sponsor the bill. You can also read more about Sunlight’s lobbying recommendations and sign up to get updates on lobbying reform here.

Yesterday evening, John reacted to President Obama's SOTU speech in which the President proposed a ban on lobbyists acting as bundlers. He criticized the proposal as "unlikely to pass Congress, and unlikely to pass muster with the courts." It's true that Congress is unlikely to do much of anything for the remainder of this session, although my bet is that the courts would uphold a bundling ban if it were structured properly. Regardless, focusing on banning lobbyist bundlers is to ignore the elephant in the room: we need to fix who is required to register as a lobbyist in the first place .

Were Congress to act in 2012, the best thing it could do is to tighten the requirement of who must register as a lobbyist so that the Newt Gingriches, Tom Daschles, and other hidden influencers will be brought into the sunlight. There's no doubt that they both have lobbied, at least under the common-sense definition of  "influenc[ing] politicians or public officials on a particular issue." The legal definition says essentially the same thing, but it allows lobbyists to evade registration so long as they avoid either spending 20% of their time lobbying or directly contacting more than 1 covered official. This is incredibly easy to do, and creates loopholes that just about everyone agrees should be closed.

So if we're going to talk about lobbying reform -- and a Pew Charitable Trust survey released Monday says 40% of Americans believe that addressing lobbyist influence is a top priority for 2012 -- the best place to start is with fixing the lobbyist registration and disclosure requirements. President Obama has addressed lobbying reform in the past, most visibly in his 2010 State of the Union speech, and his administration's actions have shown sensitivity to the importance of this issue. But he seems to have gotten sidetracked.

A good place to start is with the Lobbying Disclosure Enhancement Act, introduced by Rep. Quigley, which directly takes on the lobbying disclosure loopholes, as well as Sunlight's recommendations on this issue and the ABA Lobbying Task Force's report. For a primer, watch the Advisory Committee on Transparency's event "Washington's Lobbying Fix," which discusses all of these proposals.

Bill Clinton famously tried to claim he hadn’t lied about his relationship Monica Lewinsky by saying, "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is.” Newt Gingrich similarly contorts the English language by claiming “I was never a lobbyist.” Perhaps Gingrich’s claim depends on what the meaning of the word “lobbyist” is. If it is the loophole ridden, easily evaded legal definition in the Lobbying Disclosure Act that allows power brokers to avoid registering as lobbyists if they spend less than 20 percent of their time lobbying, then maybe, maybe, Gingrich can claim with a straight face that he was not a lobbyist. But if common sense and Miriam Webster are applied, to lobby means, “to conduct activities aimed at influencing public officials and especially members of a legislative body on legislation.” Under that definition, there can be no doubt that Gingrich was a lobbyist, even if he didn’t fill out the paperwork.

The New York Times today correctly notes that people of Gingrich’s stature never register as lobbyists. It’s time to change that. Former members of Congress who trade their political connections for paychecks must be required register and report as lobbyists so that the public knows who is paying them and what positions they are advocating. Sunlight has long supported legislation that would strengthen the definition of lobbyist by eliminating the 20 percent loophole. The law should be clear. Former members of Congress should not be able to call themselves “consultants,” “strategic advisors,” or “historians,” while taking money from corporate clients to advance their causes on Capitol Hill. They are lobbyists.

Anti-lobbyist barbs will continue to fly this election season because they win easy political points. But instead of accusations and denials, name calling and obfuscation, it’s time for real reform that will capture all who lobby and impose much needed accountability on the system.

Here’s a riddle: What do you call it when someone earns millions of dollars from corporate clients, uses his relationships with the most influential officials in government to pursue those clients’ interests, and even has offices on K Street?

Answer: If you are Newt Gingrich, not a lobbyist.

The Washington Post reports that corporate clients paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the current leader in the Republican primary in exchange for him providing “access to top transformational leadership across industry and government” through his for-profit “think tank.” Apparently they got what they paid for. According to the Post, “Gingrich also bragged about his success in pushing conservative policies and legislation in Washington during his political exile.”

We’ve written many times before about stealth lobbyists, often former Members of Congress who crawl around Capitol Hill and the White House advocating on behalf of fat cat clients, but who skirt disclosure under the lobby laws by claiming they only provide “strategic advice” or spend less than 20% of their time lobbying.

And we’ve advocated—dare I say lobbied—to change all of that.

The specter of Newt Gingrich, former non-lobbyist lobbyist, occupying the White House should galvanize calls for lobbying reform. It’s problematic enough when a former Member of Congress provides his clients with access to his friends and colleagues in the House or the Senate. But if Washington’s revolving door should swing that person into the White House, corporate interests who once paid handsomely for strategic advice will have a direct line to the leader of the country.

The Gingrich example is at the top of the list of why we need a new approach to lobbying disclosure. The most influential people in Washington can easily skirt the rules currently in place. Everyone who is not in that top tier of influence peddlers—including all of the registered lobbyists who follow the rules—should recognize the failure of the current system and work to change it by ensuring that if someone is paid to lobby, they register and report as a lobbyist.

On Wednesday Sunlight released a list of lobbyists tweeting online, allowing for collective insight into their world; who they follow; what they're promoting; and a view of how they operate through the prism of Twitter.

Yesterday Tony Hirst, lecturer in the Department of Communication and Systems at The Open University and author of ouseful.info created a series of visualizations delving deeper into our Twitter lobbyist list.

(Please keep in mind that this is just a sampling of lobbyists active on Twitter and a snapshot of their activity, I find these visualizations more interesting than instructive.)

Public social connections between members of the @SunFoundation/lobbyists list

"Popular" friends of folk on the @SunFoundation/lobbyists twitter list

That is, folks who are followed by 20 or more people on the list...

People who follow large numbers of @sunfoundation lobbyists

Method: grab the followers of folk on @sunfoundation/lobbyists, generate a net from follower to list member, filter list to nodes of degree>=20, size nodes according to out-degree, colour according to modularity statistic identified cluster.

Snapshot of US politics?

So the methodology is a little bit involved and completely made up on this one...

For each of the folk on the @sunfoundation/lobbyists list, grab a random sample of 97 their followers (or all their followers if they have less than 97). Find the people from those samples who follow at least 2 members of the list and generate the graph of those followers and all the people they follow. Filter that graph to show nodes with degree >=100, lay it out using a force directed layout in gephi, sizing nodes according to HITS Authority, then filter it again to only show nodes with indegree of 2 or more.

The intuition is that this view shows people who are followed by large numbers of people who follow 2 or more of the lobbyists.

Bear in mind that there may be all sorts of sampling errors...

If you want to do a bit of sleuthing yourself, please take a look at the Twitter lobbyist list itself or you can download this .csv file of the last 50 tweets from 191 of these lobbyist Twitter accounts to draw a bigger picture.

Yesterday, the TV News-Magazine 60 Minutes aired an interview with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. It's worth watching in its entirety, but be forewarned: it will turn your stomach.

The drumbeat continues for the twelve members of the Committee on Deficit Reduction to step up and match their newly acquired power with a new-found commitment to transparency. Today, more than a dozen organizations joined Sunlight on a letter to Super Committee members, urging them to voluntarily disclose the campaign contributions they receive from now until the committee completes its work. Just as important, the groups call for members to disclose information about the special interest meetings Super Committee members take while serving on the committee.

The letter noted that failure to ensure transparency of these fundamental avenues of influence will reinforce the public’s mistrust of the deficit reduction process and risk delegitimizing the Committee’s work.

The Committee’s efforts to make its work transparent by creating a website and making some meetings public only go so far. Real access and influence come from large campaign contributions and when special interests meet with members to plead their case. Yet nothing will be disclosed about either lobbying or campaign contributions until well after the committee makes its recommendations. Too late, in other words, for the public to understand or respond to money and access--factors that may play an oversized role in the decision making process of super committee members.

Already the public, as well as members of Congress who do not serve on the Super Committee, are at a disadvantage. The committee has begun working to find ways to make enormous cuts to defense and social spending—cuts that will affect every one of us. Yet there is no disclosure of who is asking the committee members for help or who is writing large checks to committee members. The Committee’s work is too important for secrecy to be an option.

14 Groups Call for Super Committee Transparency

The Hill’s Congress Blog last week featured an item by Howard Marlowe, president of the American League of Lobbyists, in which Mr. Marlowe called on lobbyists to “break our code of silence and show our true determination to solve the critical problems that are tying the federal government in knots.”

I’m not privy to this code, despite being a registered lobbyist myself. Apparently, Mr. Marlowe’s concern centers on lobbyists acting “as though there was no choice but to silently take the abuse to ourselves and our profession.” Poor us.

But if Marlowe is concerned about the image of lobbyists, rather than dismiss proposals to make the profession more transparent, he should embrace them. Sunlight strongly supports the H.R. 2339, the Lobbyist Disclosure Enhancement Act introduced by Rep. Quigley. The bill would require lobbyists to disclose the names of the covered executive branch officials or Members of Congress lobbied (or the name of the employer if the lobbyist meets with staff), closing a meaningless provision in current law in which lobbyists merely have to report whether they have lobbied the House, the Senate or the Executive branch.

But where is the American League of Lobbyists on this? Firmly opposed. It’s “not realistic” says Marlowe. At the same time, he claims that it was ALL who led the effort two decades ago to enact lobbyist disclosure, noting, “Today anyone can turn to a database on the Internet that tells who is lobbying, what they are lobbying for, and how much they are getting paid to lobby.” Why wouldn’t ALL then want to complete the circle of disclosure and add to that database the names of the people actually being lobbied?

Mr. Marlowe goes on to complain that President Obama’s staff uses a nearby coffee shop to meet with lobbyists, so that their presence isn’t disclosed when White House visitor logs are released. The visitor logs are a security system retooled as a disclosure system, and aren't a replacement for a complete overhaul of the lobbying laws. If lobbyists were required to report their meetings, it would be irrelevant whether the meetings took place in the West Wing or Starbucks. Again, if Mr. Marlow is so concerned that the White House is skirting its own disclosure rules, he should be endorsing greater transparency measures.

As disappointing as Mr. Marlowe’s stance on stronger lobbyist reporting is, we agree that the 20 percent loophole should be closed so that anyone who is paid to lobby must register and report. This is another component of the LDEA.

Lobbyists engage in constitutionally protected activities and should have nothing to hide. The profession would go a long way in assuaging negative assumptions about it if lobbyists break their code silence and loudly cheer greater disclosure.