Slow public access to campaign finance info

THROUGHOUT the campaign for governor, candidates Tom Corbett and Dan Onorato have called for more transparency in state government and politics.

But when it came time last week for the two candidates to file reports on their own recent fundraising, running upwards of $9.4 million, neither was willing to provide the state or the news media with clean, computerized lists of the people, businesses and political-action committees bankrolling their campaigns.

As a result, the state had to send hundreds of pages of paper filings to a private data-entry contractor to be punched into a computer, at taxpayer expense. Just six days before the election, the candidates' reports are not yet available to the public on the Department of State's campaign finance website,

http://www.campaignfinance.state.pa.us.

The voluminous reports provide more evidence of the shortcomings in state election law, allowing individuals, businesses, unions and political-action committees to contribute tens of thousands of dollars to Pennsylvania candidates with scant disclosure of their identities and financial interests.

State law requires all Pennsylvania candidates to identify the occupation and employer of anyone making a campaign donation bigger than $250.

Corbett, who's raised the most money, largely complied with the requirement. Out of 1,260 large individual donors identified in his latest report, he provided occupations and employers for all but 37, a compliance rate of 97 percent.

Onorato had 620 large individual donors, but he managed to provide occupations and employers for barely one-third of them, just 218.

Onorato listed 58 contributors as "self-employed" and 344 as "information requested" - suggesting that the campaign had contacted the donors to ask them where they work.

Among the people for whom Onorato failed to provide an occupation or employer: former Philadelphia Mayor John F. Street, a $500 contributor; businessman and onetime gubernatorial hopeful Tom Knox, who gave $5,000; restaurateur Stephen Starr, who donated $5,000; trial lawyer Leonard Barrack, one of the region's biggest Democratic donors, who gave $20,000; two top aides to Gov. Rendell, Gary Tuma and Donna Cooper, who gave $500 each, and Albert Boscov, CEO of Boscov's Department Stores, who donated $25,000.

"Corbett did a really good job and Onorato did a lazy job. You can't say you support full disclosure and deal with your reports this way," said Alex Kaplan, a researcher for Common Cause who has been trying to track political donations tied to the development of the Marcellus Shale gas industry.

Brian Herman, a spokesman for the Onorato campaign, said it will file an amended report after it collects more information from its donors.

Pennsylvania is among just 11 states that continue to allow unlimited campaign contributions. Its disclosure requirements are ranked around the middle of the 50 states, according to a comparative analysis supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts, run by the UCLA School of Law, the California Voter Foundation and the Center for Governmental Studies.

Its most recent study gave Pennsylvania's Department of State high marks for its campaign-finance website, allowing citizens to browse through candidate reports or look for donations to multiple candidates by a single contributor or employer.

But the Pew-funded researchers gave Pennsylvania failing marks for not requiring computerized filing by candidates and political-action committees - the main reason that last week's reports are not yet accessible to the public.

The Department of State has been paying about $35,000 for data-entry work to put campaign finance information on its website. It's enough to cover candidates and PACs based in Pennsylvania, but not out-of-state PACs that contribute to Pennsylvania candidates.

This year, that gap omitted Corbett's biggest contributor - the Republican Governors Association, which has given Corbett a total of just over $4 million.

The biggest contributors to the GOP governors' group this year have been out-of-state businessmen in hedge funds, energy, drugs and other industries.

The largest single donors were Paul Singer, a partner in the Elliot Management hedge fund of New York City, $994,000; Steven Cohen, of the hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, $500,000; Kenneth Griffen, CEO of the hedge fund Citadel Group in Chicago, $500,000; and investor Foster Friess, of Jackson Hole, Wyo., $250,000 to the GOP governors on top of a $100,000 donation directly to Corbett.

Also, John Paulson, a New York hedge-fund manager who made billions of dollars in 2008 and 2009 betting against subprime mortgage instruments, donated $250,000 to the Republican governors.

But none of this information is available on the state's website, because the Department of State has not been entering data from most out-of-state PACs.