May 6, 1999 | Read Time: 3 minutes
The General Accounting Office says that Congress might want to consider changing the way charities make regular reports of their lobbying expenditures to the House and Senate. Under the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995, charities that spend specified amounts of money and time to lobby federal officials must publicly disclose the issues on which they seek to influence the government, and how much they spend doing so.
A key provision in the law gives some charities a choice in the way they report their spending to Congress. The choice applies to those groups that have decided under another law to spend no more on lobbying than a set percentage of their expenses.
Those non-profit groups can calculate their costs using the definitions of lobbying found in the Lobbying Disclosure Act, which covers only contacts with federal officials.
The act also allows groups to provide Congress with essentially the same figures they already put on their federal informational tax returns — known as Forms 990 — by using a definition of lobbying found in the Internal Revenue Code. That definition covers contacts with federal, state, and local officials as well as “grassroots” efforts to influence the public, such as television commercials or mailings about a bill pending in Congress or a state legislature. Many charities prefer to file using the tax-code definition because that allows them to avoid keeping two sets of records.
The Lobbying Disclosure Act ordered the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, to study whether any laws should be changed to make the definitions of lobbying more consistent, including those that govern the advocacy of businesses.
The G.A.O. concluded that making major changes in lobbying definitions was not worthwhile. But the agency said that Congress might want to consider forcing charities to report their expenditures to the House and Senate using the definitions of the Lobbying Disclosure Act — thus removing the current option of following the Internal Revenue Code and figures from their Forms 990.
Alternatively, the G.A.O. said, Congress might want to continue to allow charities to use the figures from their Forms 990 when reporting to the House and Senate but require that groups provide only the expenses related to their lobbying of federal officials — not of state and local officials or their “grassroots” efforts. That would allow the public to get a clearer, apples-to-apples comparison of organizations’ expenditures, the G.A.O. said.
That second option might have merit, said Matthew Hamill, vice-president for public policy at Independent Sector, a coalition of charities and grant makers. “At first blush, it appears that most non-profits that use the tax-code definitions could probably make that change without an enormous increase in the accounting and paperwork required.”
Congressional sources said that the G.A.O.’s analysis probably will be taken into account by the Treasury Department and the Joint Committee on Taxation as they each study whether more information about tax-exempt groups should be made public.
The G.A.O. report, “Federal Lobbying: Differences in Lobbying Definitions and Their Impact,” may be found on the agency’s World-Wide Web site at http://www.gao.gov.
