On Tuesday, the Joint Legislative Auditing committee outlined the procedures for auditing the compensation reports of state lobbying firms. (You can read here about how the auditing will work.)
Two things stuck out from the JLA meeting.
One, the bicameral, bipartisan members of the JLA made it very clear that lobbying forms need to disclose how much of their fees are for work before the executive branch and how much is for advocacy before the legislative branch. In other words, no more double reporting of fees, not even “in an abundance of caution.”
With this directive in mind, look for several firms to actually see their reported overall revenues decline in 2014 because, for reasons good and bad, they have been over-reporting the fees they earn.
The JLA’s procedures also lay out how the firms to be audited will be randomly selected.
One lobbyist told me that the public meetings at which the JLA will select the firms harken back to the days when numbered balls were randomly selected to determine one’s draft order for military service in Vietnam.
It won’t be that bad, will it?
