The House unanimously passed a bill this week to create a task force within the Justice Department to crack down on lobbyists who flake on disclosure laws.
“We wanted to put some teeth behind current law because there seem to be quite a few scofflaws out there on K Street,” freshman congresswoman Mary Jo Kilroy (D-Ohio), the bill’s author, told HuffPost.
The Secretary of the Senate has referred 8,729 possible violations of the Lobbying Disclosure Act to the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office since 1995; more than half of those occurred during the second half of 2009. And yet the feds have pursued only three enforcement actions in all that time and none since 2005.
Full story: House Passes Bill To Crack Down On K Street ‘Scofflaws’