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Kansas Ethics Commission director outlines draft overhaul: PAC rules, coordination, reporting thresholds and subpoena tweaks
Summary
Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission Director Mark Skoglin presented a draft overhaul of campaign finance statutes, proposing clearer PAC definitions, higher independent-expenditure reporting thresholds, administrative terminations of inactive accounts, subpoena procedure changes and coordination rules modeled on Minnesota.
Mark Skoglin, director of the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission (KGEC), presented a consolidated draft of statutory changes the commission proposes to clarify campaign finance enforcement and reporting.
Skoglin said the draft focuses on clarifying several contested areas from the 2023 interim committee: PAC definitions, coordination rules, reporting thresholds, account termination and subpoena procedure. He told the committee he generally avoided rolling back procedural reforms enacted in 2023 and instead targeted substantive clarifications learned from two years of experience with the new statutes.
On political action committees, Skoglin proposed narrowing or clarifying the major-purpose test and creating a rebuttable presumption that an entity is a political committee if it expends more than $2,500. “It also creates an additional fine to try to deter people from gaming the system,” Skoglin said, describing draft penalties for PACs that fail to register or report.
On reporting thresholds, Skoglin proposed raising the independent-expenditure filing threshold from $100 to $1,000 and making the filing event-based (file within 10 days of the expenditure). He also said the draft would require electronic filing for state-office reports and permit administrative termination of inactive PACs and candidate accounts (for candidates inactive six years after last term or last election).
Skoglin said the draft adds an express-advocacy interpretation: communications issued within 90 days of an election that a reasonable reader would interpret only as advocacy for or against a candidate should be treated as express advocacy. He also proposed clarifying the “giving in the name of another” (conduit contributions) rules and simplifying the paid-for disclaimer statute to include text messages and clearer language for candidates and filers.
On subpoenas, Skoglin proposed allowing the commission to serve a subpoena before filing a district-court enforcement action while preserving the requirement that subpoenas are unenforceable until a court order is obtained — a change he characterized as a technical measure to allow recipients to cooperate without the cost of immediate litigation.
On coordination, Skoglin said the draft borrows concepts from Minnesota’s statute: a shared-vendor rule that treats services as coordinated if the same consultant works for a candidate and for an entity doing express advocacy within 120 days unless a written firewall policy is in place; limitations on the use of nonpublic information; and a definition of candidate participation (requests, suggestions or involvement in content, timing, audience or volume). The draft also lists several safe harbors for routine interactions (use of public information, providing donor names, isolated requests) that by themselves would not constitute coordination.
Skoglin also proposed an exception to civil-fine caps for “willful or wanton” conduct, authorizing penalties up to $15,000 per violation in egregious cases. He emphasized the draft leaves many numeric thresholds adjustable and open to legislative input.
Skoglin said the commission provided the draft text and an indexed spreadsheet to legislators and that materials are posted to the committee’s shared drive and the Legislature’s website.
