[Comment] Lobbyist transparency cannot be optional
CRAIG HOLMAN
23.06.2008 @ 08:33 CET
EUOBSERVER / COMMENT - The European Commission finally will unveil its lobbyist registry today (23 June), implementing part of the long-debated European Transparency Initiative (ETI) championed by Vice President Siim Kallas. Its stated objective: "to increase the transparency with which the EU handles the responsibilities and funds entrusted to it by the European citizen."
"The European Commission is betraying the public's trust" (Photo: CE)
Despite a great deal of optimism originally offered by Kallas' sincere commitment for meaningful transparency of information about those who lobby the European Commission, the disclosure model that has been taking shape over the past several months falls far short of that objective.
Of all the shortcomings of the American system of lobbying regulation – and there are many – transparency is not one of them. The success of the U.S. Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) in mandating the registration and financial disclosure of professional lobbyists and their clients highlights some of the grave weaknesses of the latest version of the ETI.
The Abramoff scandal
The United States has been stung by lobbyist corruption on Capitol Hill and in the White House. Disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff bought favours from members of Congress, their staffs and executive branch officials through wining and dining, luxury trips, money and promises of lucrative future employment.
The LDA required that Abramoff and his associates register as lobbyists, identify their clients, and disclose their income and expenditures – with all this information posted on the Internet.
It took a few years, but the press, public and Department of Justice eventually connected the dots of the money trail, and Abramoff's house of cards collapsed. He is now sitting in prison, and 14 other government officials and lobbyists have also been convicted of corruption, with more likely to come.
This corruption would have continued unabated had Abramoff the option not to register, not to identify his clients, not to disclose his finances.
The latest rendition of the ETI provides just such an inadequate and optional system of registration of lobbying firms and their clients, minus the names of individual lobbyists and minus payments received from clients.
For those who wish to disclose their finances, the registry will report aggregate expenditures within whopping increments of €50,000 – or, alternatively, within bands of every 10 percent of a lobbying firm's overall revenues.
For those who do not wish to register and disclose, they simply will not. This won't provide enough information for the public to discern anything meaningful about who is influencing the government and how they are doing it.
Disclosure must be mandatory. If revealing the identity of a client vying for a government contract will be counter productive, no lobbyist is going to do it.
If lobbyists are involved in laundering of money or other illegal activity, which occurs on occasion, they certainly aren't going to reveal that information to the public. Yet this is the very information that a system of lobbying transparency seeks to uncover. A voluntary system is ineffective; mandatory disclosure is the bedrock of the LDA and should also be at the core of the ETI.
Disclosure requirements must include the identities of lobbyists and their clients. If the identities of lobbyists or their clients are not made public, it becomes unnecessarily difficult to monitor compliance to the law. Cloaking the identities of individual lobbyists also casts a dark and suspicious pall over the entire profession.
In the United States, all individual lobbyists, including myself, report who we are and for whom we are employed, and the identities of our paying clients.
Reportable financial activity must provide clarity, not confusion. In the United States, lobbyists round off their expenditures to the nearest $10,000 (€7,500) in each three-month period. The ETI proposal is nearly five times higher, which does not reflect the reality of lobbying expenditures.
Such an inaccurate reporting system will grossly hide, or grossly exaggerate, actual lobbying expenditures, depending on how one wants to interpret the value of the financial tier.
To allow an alternative reporting of percentage ranges is to mix apples and oranges in the transparency basket, which can serve no logical purpose other than to befuddle the public. And all this masking of lobbying financial activity does not even make the reporting requirement any easier on lobbyists.
It is disappointing that the European Commission is retreating from its earlier commitment to transparency.
Until now, the Commission had led the charge for the openness in government that is so critical to gaining the public's trust. But the implementation of the ETI that is now unfolding betrays that trust.
The author is a campaign finance lobbyist for Public Citizen, a Washington-based non-profit organisation representing consumer interests in the US Congress