News Items

December 01, 2009

It’s the details that’ll drive you crazy.  Like amending your FEC 1 to reflect the fact that your company or association has filed as a lobbyist with the House of Representatives and/or the U. S. Senate. That was a FEC requirement that came through earlier this year, and a recent analysis conducted by CQ Moneyline and reported in Roll Call November 16, 2009 indicates that about 800 PACs failed to comply. How does a requirement like this get missed?   Maybe it’s the way a company or association organizes its functions.  Maybe the PAC team is on the first floor and the lobbyists are on the third, or the PAC is being managed in Cincinnati, and the lobbyists are in D.C.  Or maybe it was missed by the outside lawyer who’s supposed to know these things. These and a handful of other questions are no doubt swirling around those organizations that are now potentially the target of an FEC inquiry.

Call it tooting our horn or whatever you choose, unquestionably, this is a perfect example why many organizations NEED (my emphasis) a PAC compliance service. When we saw the FEC requirement earlier this year, we went through our client list, determined which ones were registered as lobbyists and would need to have their Form 1’s amended, and prepared them.  We then checked with the others to verify they were using external lobbying services which would exempt them from having to amend their Statements of Organization.

This is what PAC compliance services do.  I’m sure my competitors did the same for their clients.  It’s why occasionally I’ll get a note from a client that simply says: “We really appreciate what PAC Outsourcing does for us.”  And, by the way, we amended all of our clients’ Statements as part of our annual retainer fee…no extra charge.  So the next time the discussion comes up about the need for a PAC compliance service, keep this incident in mind, and why having a service that focuses fulltime on PAC requirements makes sense.