March 15, 2008
[Updated March 24, 2008]

Summary of Contributions and Expenditures of Kansas Political Action Committees (PACs)

Which PAC Reports have "Errors and Omissions" that should be fixed?

Shown below is part of the web page from the Ethics Commission listing Kansas PACs and available reports for the 2007-2008 election cycle:

http://ethics.ks.gov/CFAScanned/PACs/2008ElecCycle/PAC%20Links2008EC.htm 

. . . 

To see the Chair and Treasurer of a PAC, one can follow the "S/O" (Statement of Organization) link, and often find information about how the PAC's affiliation to other groups.  Often the name of the PAC reflects the affiliation, but that is not always the case.  

Sometimes known affiliations are not mentioned in this Statement.  Kansas Law should require that any related 501(c)3 or 501(c)4 should be mentioned in this Statement of Organization.  

 To see money information from a PAC's report, one must follow the link to the PDF of the report.  Page 1 of the report gives summary information for the reporting period.  For example, shown below is page 1 of the Greater Kansas City Chamber's PAC report for Jan 10, 2008:

In Feb 2004 when these reports cost $0.50/page for copies, I asked the Ethics Commission to consider putting the information from the first page of such reports in a summary table of all PACs so a quick comparison could be made of the activity of the various PACs.  At that time I volunteered to do the data entry of the summary numbers (money received, money spent, and money in the bank) for free for the Ethics Commission if they would put the summary table online on their web page.  My offer was declined in Feb 2004, and we have all the information online now, but we still don't have a simple summary table for comparison of PACs.

In addition to the first page summary, a Schedule A lists the name and address of contributors, and the occupation of any individual giving more than $150.  The last page of Schedule A gives a summary of unitemized contributions ($50 or less) and any contributions when the contributor is not known.  Schedule D lists the expenditures. Schedule B lists "In-Kind" contributions, which are usually payments made on behalf of the PAC.  Schedule C show expenditures and other disbursements and should show the purpose of the expenditure or disbursement.  

While the PAC reports are now available online, an interested citizen cannot easily make much sense of the information. Simple questions cannot be easily answers:

• Who are the leaders of each PAC?  
• Which PACs raise a lot of money? 
•  Which PACs spend a lot of money?
•  Does PAC "A" raise or spend more money than PAC "B"?  
• Which PACs have a lot of money in the bank to be used in the next election?  
• Which PACs transfer large amounts of money to other PACs? 
• Which PACs have outstanding loans from whom? T

These questions can be answered by visiting links on the Commission's web site, but a lot of "clicking" and manual work is needed to answer simple questions. There should be a better way to summarize this information to help citizens understand the political money raised and spent, and thus the political power of PACs in their support of causes and candidates. 

Summary of PACs Reports from most recent reporting period.

Since I've been frustrated since 2004 that a PAC summary table was not available, I decided to create the table I've been asking for.  In my spare time, I started this project last Saturday and finished the table on Thursday night.  My guess is this project took perhaps 20 hours of work, but could be done in minutes if the information from the PAC reports were available in an electronic form that could be analyzed.  (PDFs are an electronic form, but Excel files, or CSV files, could be analyzed by a computer program.)

This new summary report shows the PAC name, the report city, the chair and treasurer of the PAC, links to their most recent reports (like before), the $ Raised, $ Spent, $ In the Bank, $ In-Kind, and Comments.  The Comments column was used to identify loan information, large contributors (generally $5000 or more, or sole contributors), large expenditures (generally $5000 or more), large unitemized contributions or expenditures (generally $500 or more).  In a few cases, some additional comments about a PAC from other sources are included.

A sample  page of this summary report of all PACs is shown below.  

Click here to download PDF

Summary of Contributions and Expenditures of Kansas PACs:  Jan 10, 2008 Reports

"Fun Facts" from the Summary Table

Here are some interesting details from the summary report:

Notices Sent to PACs

Apparently starting in 2008, the Ethics Commission will post the notices sent to PAC treasurers online.  In Jan 2008 eleven notices were sent to PACs for Failure to File, and many of these missing reports have been submitted and are online.  At present only two are still missing:  

• Kansas State UAW PAC
• Leavenworth NEA Teachers PAC

Errors and Omissions

Past Election Cycle.  No Errors and Omissions Notices have been posted online in past years, but with the new page mentioned above, "E&O" notices likely will be online this year.  

Oddly, several problems about errors and omissions in PAC reports from the 2005-2006 cycle reported to the Ethics Commission have never resulted in amended reports being filed.  In particular, no amended reports were ever made for these problems:

• "Wichita Voters for Truth" Political Action Committee Ignores Reporting Requirements, Kansas Meadowlark, Dec 10, 2007.
• Strange political money transfers between ProKanDo PAC and Young Democrats of America 527, Kansas Meadowlark, Aug 20, 2007.
• How the names of political contributors of over $52,000 were hidden on the ProKanDo PAC Reports, Kansas Meadowlark, Aug 20, 2007.

Current Election Cycle.  A number of errors and omissions are noted in the attached summary report in red.   Many of these errors and omissions are quite minor, but there seems no incentive to provide correct or complete information.  There doesn't seem to be any penalty for many errors and omissions.  

Some missing reports or sections of reports should be noted in the online "Errors and Omissions" report, and the PAC should be required to file an amended report.  

Several problems were noted with Statements of Organization, including incomplete addresses. 

The problems with  the reports included:

• Missing complete reports
• Missing Schedule A
• Missing Schedule C
• Missing addresses on contributors; missing occupations on contributions more than $150.
• Missing addresses on expenditures
• Illegible report 

A few problems with the Ethics Commission web page were noted, including:

• link to wrong page
• missing attachment
• misspelled PAC name

The most serious problems appear to be with the ProKanDo PAC report. 

• ProKanDo failed to report the occupation for 68 contributors giving more than $150.  On average, these 68 contributors gave almost $500.
• ProKanDo reported receiving $18,824 in contributions from a fundraising company they hired. [An Aug 2007 Meadowlark report gave details of another $52,000 hidden in this same way from the same fundraising company.]  On their web page The Hudson Bay Company of Illinois (based in Minnesota) shows ProKanDo as one of their clients for fundraising.  Hudson Bay makes phone calls solicitations for ProKanDo and ProKanDo reports the fundraising company as the source of the contributions, which hides these contributors from appearing in their report.

What's missing?

Some out-of-state PACs file "verified statements" instead of PAC reports.  E-mails from Carol Williams explain the current law:

Carol Williams, Ethics Commission Executive Director, March 31, 2003:
Verified Statements are public records and can be viewed in the Secretary of State's office for those committees that contribute to state candidates.  Those out-of-state political committees that monetarily support local candidates file a verified statement in the home county election office of the local candidate.   I would imagine that you can purchase the verified statements from the Secretary of State like any other documents the Elections Division has.

Unlike registered PACs, there is no list of those political committees who file verified statements since they are only required to file a verified statement in a reporting period IF they make a contribution to a candidate.  Therefore, they may file a pre-primary statement because they made a donation in the primary and never file a statement again until a new election year, or maybe never depending on whether they make additional contributions.  PACs must file periodic reports whether they make contributions or not.  Out of state PACs who chose to file verified statements only do so in the time period they make the contribution.

Carol Williams, Ethics Commission Executive Director, Aug 21, 2006
Under K.S.A. 25-4172, out-of-state PACs can either register as a Kansas PAC or submit a "Verified Statement" in lieu of registering as a Kansas PAC.

One example of an out-of-state PAC that files verified statements but donates a considerable amount of money to Kansas politics is the Heavy Constructors PAC from Kansas City, MO.  A March 2007 Meadowlark report gave details:  Weak Kansas Laws Allow "Heavy" Missouri Group to Hide Their Political Involvement in Kansas Politics.

The amount of money spent by the Heavy Constructors on Kansas statewide candidates has increased dramatically in the last five years but that hasn't resulted in changes in reporting requirements in Kansas.

Source:  Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission

As reported before, this Missouri PAC does not appear to file a complete report of its political activity in either Kansas or Missouri shown by this summary from the 2005-2006 election cycle:

How did the Heavy Constructors spend $198,300 in Kansas in 2005-2006?

This amount of political money spent by an out-of-state PAC should not be given preferential treatment and should be online in Kansas.

All out-of-state PACs and federal 527 PACs are not covered in the summary report. [527 PAC information can be found in IRS 8872 filings on the IRS web site.]  

Still a black-hole in Kansas ...

Local committees must file reports with county clerks or local election offices, but these reports are not required to be online, and the filing requirements are often months after an election. 

In some cases, federal IRS laws govern these local groups and some political money information can be found months or years later from the IRS.  For example, according to their 2004 IRS 990, the group "Think Big Committee", orchestrated by the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, spent $3.5 million in 2004 to "promote passage of BiState Tax Initiative." 

The Statement of Organization filed by the Greater Kansas City Chamber never identified its relationship to the "Think Big Committee" or the earlier "Bistate Arts and Sports Corporation."

Most of the "Think Big" money was reported in a Nov 3, 2004 Meadowlark report that identified $2.8 million in cash was available.  A 2006 IRS 990 reported the termination of this group.  

This 2004 "Think Big" initiative was an encore political act after their 2002 attempt to push a bistate tax.  See Missouri Money Flowing into Kansas Elections (2002).  The public still doesn't know much about this political money. 

Kansas still needs better reporting about the activities of local committees.