Eight employees of the APOC can't possibly do everything mandated by state law
It should come as no surprise that the office of acting Attorney General Cori Mills, supplemented by the office of shadow attorney general Stephen Cox, had the staff available to find errors in 91 of 121 financial disclosure statements of candidates.
The acting general and the shadow general, who was rejected by the Legislature last spring, had the benefit of any number of paralegals and investigators they could call upon to produce this analysis.
The Alaska Public Offices Commission, by contrast, has an executive director and eight other positions, one of which is vacant. It has a budget of $1.3 million.
Subtract the programmer and law office assistant and you are left with a handful of paralegals who can’t possibly perform all of the tasks assigned to the tiny agency under state law. It administers the campaign disclosure law, the lobbying law, the legislative financial disclosure law and the public official financial disclosure law.
APOC has long made it clear to state politicians that it doesn’t have the staff to audit thousands of reports and that it has had trouble for decades retaining employees because of the workload and the pressure.
The law requires the staff to examine, investigate and compare all reports, but everyone paying any attention knows that wasn’t even happening when the agency had 14 employees a dozen years ago.
“The agency is not able to meet the auditing requirements for POFD/LFD (Public Official Financial Disclosure/ Legislative Financial Disclosure) as currently in statute due to staffing limitations,” the APOC executive director told state officials a decade ago in a blistering report on the agency’s weaknesses.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy and Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom said the errors on many disclosure statements by candidates led her to put Tregarrick Taylor back on the ballot for the governor’s race. Her decision is probably not legal, though we will see if any court challenges arise.
Our politicians, from the governor on down, have refused to appropriate the funds needed for APOC to cover all the bases.
It is rank hypocrisy for Dunleavy to claim ignorance about the situation as he did Monday. We are supposed to believe that he has just discovered after eight years that APOC needs an overhaul.
“An independent committee should be formed to review ‘all the laws, the regulations, the processes, the practices, the remediation, the whole list of everything involved in APOC,’” Dunleavy said at a press event Monday.
“That’s something that I’ve been thinking about quite honestly for some time, and this just kind of hits home that it is long overdue,” Dunleavy claimed.
Honestly, he probably began thinking about this a few days ago.
I have written many times about deliberate state efforts to cripple APOC, usually with benign neglect, though in 2025 Rep. Kevin McCabe led a Republican effort to do away with the APOC, falsely claiming that the agency duplicated the work of the Federal Election Commission.
The Federal Election Commission has no power to regulate state and local elections.
Worse than McCabe’s clueless tirade about the APOC was that 10 other dim-bulb Republicans joined him in trying to eliminate APOC and end enforcement of campaign disclosure laws—Reps. Jamie Allard, Mike Prax, Julie Coulombe, Bill Elam, George Rauscher, Rebecca Schwanke, Cathy Tilton, Frank Tomaszewski, Jubilee Underwood and Sarah Vance.
Prax said most voters don’t care or pay attention to the APOC. Instead of requiring APOC campaign finance disclosures, “we should just listen to what people say and take it at that.” In other words, don’t worry about the money.
Allard claimed a school board member has to disclose more than the president, and she agreed with McCabe that the federal agency should be relied upon, though she confused the Federal Election Commission and the Federal Communications Commission.
“We need to go with the FCC (sic) and how they report,” she said.
Here is a 2015 audit of the APOC that cited high staff turnover as a problem and how the agency was not meeting mandates. It had 13.5 employees then. The staff chart showed three attorneys, three paralegals and four law office assistants.
APOC had an operating budget of $1.5 million, which would be more than $2.1 million today.
I believe that what I wrote 10 years ago about the APOC’s many near-death experiences remains true today:
Part of the problem is that many elected officials believe APOC is a nuisance agency that exists solely to make their lives miserable with indecipherable regulations. Defenders of the agency are often those outside of government who rely on the information it collects. But no candidate misses a chance to use APOC reports against an opponent. The work the agency does is crucial to news coverage and to public understanding of certain elements of state politics.
More often than not, the state response to the perpetual irritation with APOC since 1974 has been to try to minimize its effectiveness. The agency came into existence by legislative action after the Watergate scandal, when a voter initiative to create a stronger campaign watchdog group was headed for easy passage.
It has attracted bipartisan opposition over the years, but Republicans have tended to find it more objectionable. State government has usually given the agency a lot less money than it needs to enforce the laws, while complaining APOC does not do enough to enforce the laws.
The last serious attempt to kill it was in 2003 when former Gov. Frank Murkowski said it was too slow to act on complaints and "has become a vehicle which focuses nearly all media attention on allegations of misconduct and not on the factual reporting of contributions."
It enjoyed a temporary resurgence after the Veco Corp. scandal and the FBI raids on legislative offices.
The co-chairman of the House Finance Committee in 2007, Rep. Kevin Meyer, argued at the time APOC needed more resources. "I just think that with everything that's happened down in Juneau, I think they could catch things in the early stage before they progress or mature into a federal offense," said Meyer, now the president of the Senate.
As time passed and the Veco scandal faded from memory, the political desire to "catch things in the early stage" vanished.
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