OKLAHOMA CITY — The Oklahoma Ethics Commission will have to spend about $100,000 to comply with a new state law requiring local election candidates to report campaign finances to the state rather than city and county offices.
The Guardian system is not currently able to accept reports from political subdivisions, such as cities and counties, as required by state law, said Ethics Commission Executive Director Lee Anne Bruce Boone. The Commission terminated a contract with a vendor that was supposed to create an updated Guardian system which would have allowed for local election reporting and returned to the original Civix system, which lacks the capacity to accept the extra filings.
Civix is willing to build Guardian’s capacity and update the system to allow for around 3,000 extra filers, but it would take 12 to 15 weeks and an estimated $100,000 which would most likely come from an existing pool of funding, Bruce Boone said.
“While we have worked really, really hard to get stability and have our legacy system come up and deliver a functioning reporting system due to what happened regarding (Guardian) 2.0, that leaves us temporarily unable to accept reports from political subdivisions,” she said at a meeting Thursday. “That is something that we were anticipating that would be built into our new system, and so that legacy system, of course, did not have the capability for that, nor did we anticipate it would need the capability for that.”
Senate Bill 890, which took effect Nov. 1, moved campaign finance reports and disclosures for municipalities, counties and school districts to be under the purview of the Oklahoma Ethics Commission.
The Ethics Commission is advising local election candidates to save all paper records until the agency has a systemwide option for electronic reporting, Bruce Boone said.
“We’ve got fixed statutory deadlines,” she said. “We already investigated whether or not we could just have these filed locally again for a short time period, is that an option? Well, the statute says that they have to be filed with us, so we can’t really go backwards due to that statutory language.”
Temporary solutions while Civix updates Guardian could include hiring temporary staff or contacting statewide contract partners to build an online repository for transparent, electronic access to local campaign finance records, Bruce Boone said.
“We don’t have the ability for 3,000 new filers to send all of their reports to our office with this limited staff that we have,” she said. “We want to make sure that it’s accurate, that we have integrity in our reporting. We want to be transparent. This is a problem, let’s be honest. And it’s a problem because we had to terminate our contract.”
The Ethics Commission has sued the previous vendor to recover $800,000 in damages.
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