Did clients under-report payments to top lobbyist?

Well, here's a bit of quirky irony: Don Beason, the former top-ranked lobbyist whom the N.C. Secretary of State's office is reported to be investigating to determine whether he asked his clients to under-report how much they were paying him, was a member of a 2004 study committee the same office named to come up with improvements to the state's lobbying laws.

Beason was one of the original members of Secretary of State Elaine Marshall's Advisory Council on Legislative Lobbying Policy and Regulation. She named the committee in early 2004 because she thought the state's lobbying laws were inadequate and ineffective. The council, chaired by then-UNC Law School Dean Gene Nichol, made a number of recommendations for beefing up lobbyist laws. Acting on those proposals and later revelations about lobbying practices, the legislature adopted a number of lobbyist regulation changes, including finally doing away with so-called "goodwill lobbying" of the sort that Beason and many other lobbyists used to pay for legislative dinners and other events not specifically related to a legislative proposal. Under the goodwill lobbying exception, lobbyists didn't have to report the names of all attendees.

(Full disclosure: Marshall asked me to serve on that council, but the Observer normally doesn't approve of employees serving on boards they're also likely to be writing about, for obvious reasons related to a conflict of interests.)

The N&O story Tuesday by Sarah Ovaska quotes a four-page sworn statement filed in Wake Superior Court by investigator John Lynch as saying, "I have discovered a pattern of under reporting of the lobbyist compensation," Lynch wrote. "This under reporting is often done at the instruction of the lobbyist without any written or substantial justification." Lynch believed Beason may have asked some of his 24 clients in 27 not to accurately report what they paid him in 2007.

Beason, you may recall, got out of the lobbying business entirely after news broke that he had once loaned then-House Speaker Jim Black, D-Mecklenburg, $500,000. Black is now serving time in federal prison on charges related to payments he made to another legislator to help him stay in power, among other things.