Lobbying disclosure forms provide an incomplete picture
Lobbying disclosure forms are supposed to bring the business of influencing Congress out of the back room and put it in front of the public.
But since the government relies on self-reporting by lobbyists, law firms, and companies, the reports provide an incomplete picture. It may be only an accidental metaphor that disclosure records are kept underground in a dark corner of Capitol Hill.
The Globe's review of more than 2,500 lobbying records revealed that lobbyists regularly leave the forms short of even the most basic information required by the Lobbying Disclosure Act. The House clerk, tasked with making sure lobbyists file adequate semiannual disclosures, has only limited authority to police tens of thousands of detailed pages.
The House provides access to computer stations where lobbying forms can be examined, and the Senate has a website; however, the limited search functions of both reveal that neither chamber can provide a complete picture of lobbying in Washington.
Guidelines instruct lobbyists to provide a three-letter code describing each issue on which they lobbied or planned to lobby. But not all lobbyists followed that rule explicitly.
For example, anyone who lobbied on the energy bill is required to list an ENG code. But searching the database by ENG would not reveal all energy-related lobbying, because energy overlaps with such issues as taxes, transportation, the environment, manufacturing, and defense. Some energy companies included several lobbying codes on their forms, but some did not.
The Globe found, for example, that $387,830,286 was spent by companies and interest groups filing more than 1,200 lobbying reports that included the ENG code, and a total of $428,034,725 was spent by over 1,300 entities filing under the Medicare code, MMM.
Those totals do not include money spent by those who lobbied on those bills but used a different code, such an ENV for environment, UTI for utilities, FUE for fuel, gas and oil, and TAX.
The result is that far more money was spent on energy and Medicare lobbying than the records reflect. 