Thursday, August 11, 2005

Politics - FEC finds misreporting by DeLay committee - sacbee.com

The Sacremento Bee is reporting on the FEC audit of the Americans for a Republican Majority, the leadership PAC of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. While the media is probably going to have a field day with this audit report, it is nothing particularly suprising.

Having now read the audit report by the FEC, many of the misreporting by ARMPAC is nothing particularly new or actually verifiably wrong. PACs often make mistakes when dealing with their finances and reporting them. PACs with a complicate operation structure like ARMPAC make more than most.

There were three issues the FEC Audit staff found. A mistatement of Financial Activity is simply that. Some items were reported incorrectly or not not reported at all. Poor recordkeeping policies and likely a failure to adequately reconcile bank accounts against their FEC reports contributed to this problem. For example, the FEC notes that ARMPAC reported $88,000 in receipts for which there was no deposit. When the PAC received over $3.6 million in the two year cycle, a mistake totaling $88,000 amounts to only 2.4% error.

Reading Audit reports is difficult because the numbers are presented in an aggregate for a two year period. Before jumping off the deep end, the media needs to spend a few minutes understanding what is being reported. This is not to say that DeLay and ARMPAC are not at fault, but the size of hte fault is not all that much.

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