Survey: Georgia last in U.S. ethics laws enforcement
Georgia ranks dead last in a major new state-by-state survey of ethics laws and enforcement. The State Integrity Investigation is a joint project of the Center for Public Integrity, Public Radio International, and Global Integrity.
The Georgia report was compiled by Jim Walls, a former editor of the Atlanta-Journal Constitution’s investigative team, who now writes his own blog, Atlanta Unfiltered. Walls sharply criticized the enforcement of the State’s ethics laws, including the 2010 measure written by Republican House Speaker David Ralston.
That law has no caps on gifts from lobbyists to lawmakers, but relies on faster disclosure requirements and better public access to the reports.
Walls told WABE that Georgia’s laws look fine on paper, but the State government campaign finance commission, formerly known as the ethics commission, has sustained years of budget cuts, leaving it unable to audit more than a handful of the reports that candidates and lobbyists file.“The oversight procedures that are set in place are relatively weak. And the transparency cannot necessarily be ensured if nobody’s looking at the disclosures and the information that’s filed and seeing if it’s accurate and complete,” says Walls.
Speaker Ralston and House Ethics Committee Chairman, Joe Wilkinson, A Sandy Springs republican, declined interview requests. However, but referred WABE to Rick Thompson, who served as Executive Secretary of the ethics commission from 2004 to 2009, and now runs his own consulting firm which helps politicians and lobbyists with campaign finance and disclosure compliance.
Thompson, who said he was speaking on his own, told WABE that the commission has enough staff and funding to handle its workload, and that in recent years, Georgia has imposed some of the Nation’s highest fines of lobbyists who’ve violated disclosure rules. Thompson argues that’s evidence that the State ethics panel is anything but weak.
“The commission seems not only aggressive, but over-aggressive. So to not be able to rank strong on that…I don’t understand how they came to the answers,” says Thompson.
Thompson said the State does need to improve its ethics oversight, but he said Georgia should not be ranked as low as it is.
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