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Lobby Money
Official: Recipient Lobbyist Client Date: Desc. $ Money Type

No records found.
Maybe there were no expendtures for what you selected.
Maybe the legislator you selected may not have been in office that year.
If you picked the current year, there will be no lobbyist expenditure reports released until early March.
In 2021 only 7 expenditures were reported in January -- none for legislators or statewide officials.
Try selecting an earlier Seek Year:

To display a list of lobbyist expenditures

• Office Year: Select the year for the list of officials in office or registered lobbyists
• Category: Select the category for your search (gov't officials, lobbyists, etc.)
• Get: Select from the list the entry to search -then the list of entries meeting your criteria will be displayed here
• Seek Year: Select the year to search.


Office Year:  Category:   Get:   Seek Year:    

Recent Years

This database has become decreasingly significant after passage of the "Clean Missouri" ballot issue restrictions on lobbyist expenditures took effect. See Clean Missouri Effects at the bottom of this page.

Navigating The Lobbyist Spending Site

First, select the year you want to search. Then, the category of the search (statewide officials, Senate members, House members, groups, lobbyists or clients -- see below for details of the categories).

Once a category for the search as been selected, the selection-box to the right will be filled, in alphabetical order, with all the different names found for expenditure reports filed under the category you selected. The names in the list box will be simplified and combined to facilitate search selecitons (see below).

Once you have selected a specific entry (official, group, lobbyist or client) all the expenditure reports in which that selection was found will be displayed at the top.

If you would like to see the actual fields of the Missouri Ethics Commission expenditure report, simply double click the item of interest.

At the bottom of the category list will be a Seek option that lets you enter a name or part of a name for which a search will be conducted for both the official field and the recipient field of each record.

This search function is provided for those two fields because of the wide disparity in how lobbyists identify local officials and government officials who are not employees of government officials. It prevents creating the type of lists available for other categories.

Background

MDN's databases on lobbyist expenditure reports are constructed from information filed by lobbyists with the Missouri Ethics Commission (MEC).

Each expenditure report includes the amount expended, the date the expenditure was made, the actual recipient (if not the public official) and an explanation of the expenditure.

Thousands of reports expenditures are filed each year by nearly thousand registered lobbyists. There is no independent verification of the information reported. And here, at MDN, we have discovered quite a few errors.

Programs used to construct MDN's database seek to correct those errors, when possible and to provide consistency in the names of the public officials listed. In some cases, fields have been combined to make the MDN display more user friendly. See the Notes section below for details.

MDN's data covers lobbyist expenditures for elected state officials (statewide office holders and legislators) as well as legislative groups. Between 20 to 30 percent of lobbyist expenditures go to others such as unelected government and and local officials.

Unfortunately, many of these entries provide little or no information about the governmental entity nor the recipient's governmental unit. Some have just a name without a clue as to the governmental agency or the recipient's position.

Data Fields

Display Functions at the Bottom

View the Entire MEC Report

To view the full report filed with the Missouri Ethics Commission for a particular entry, simply double-click the entry.

That will pop up a display of every field in MEC's database for a lobbyist expenditure.

These fields were compressed substantially in 2019. Starting that year, there were -- 14 fields for individual public official expenditures or 13 fields for group expenditures -- in the order in which they appear in MEC's database:

Notes

  1. For the first two months of the year, there will be no lobbyist expenditure reporters.

    The reason is that any expenditures for January will not be reported by lobbyists until February.

    Then, there is a one-month delay before the reports are made public to allow any corrections lobbyists wish to make, sometimes because the official who benefited from the expenditure objected.

    The result is that any expenditures in January will not be public and available to MDN until the first business day of March.

  2. Prior to to 2019, lobbyist handled amended reports quite differently. The original report remained in the data base, but was referenced in a separate report amending the original report.

    Because of that change, there may be no indication about the original explanation, date or amount cited in the original report.

    For expenditures with a $0.0 expenditure, that almost certainly is an amended report that removed any expenditure for the recipient.

  3. It is difficult to exaggerate the nightmare one encounters in trying to bring order to the thousands of separate expenditure reports filed by lobbyists. Often legislators are listed under the generic "Public Official" category rather than the correct "Representative" or "Senator" category. Even worse, the recipient named in a report sometimes is different from the public official's actual name. Occasionally names are misspelled. Less frequently, we've encountered entries that appear to be an attempt to hide the actual public official recipient by simply citing the district number rather than the required name or just citing a last name with no first name or title of the official.

  4. One complexity in making sense of the lobbyist expenditure reports is the wide variety of ways lobbyists would identify the same client for whom an expenditure was made.

    Some client names were misspelled. The misspellings and incorrect wording for clients names suprised us since these lobbyists are being paid by those companies. You'd think they'd get the names of their clients correct. Some expenditures used an improper company name, followed by some sort of DBA ending (meaning "doing business as").

    Our MDN database application groups under a common name when the actual client is obvious. For example, "AMEREN" is displayed as the client for expenditures listed under "UNION ELECTRIC." For apparent typos in a client name, we went on line to make sure the incorrect name did not actually exist.

    The ranking display of expenditures by clients and the drop-down list of clients use those shorter, corrected names. But in the display of individual expenditures, name under client will be MDN's corrected name followed by what actually was entered by the lobbyist as the client.

  5. At MDN we have written literally hundreds of lines of code to attempt to include for a public official every lobbyist expenditure reported for that official when the recipient is obvious. But, in the spirit of journalism, we have not included under a public official's lobbyist expenditures any entry for which the public official is not absolutely clear. In other words, we've followed the basic standard of journalism -- "if in doubt, don't report it."

  6. Several times, we at MDN have discovered a lobbyist expenditure reported on behalf of a legislator who had left office one or more years earlier. Those reports are included, but it is impossible to tell if the expenditure actually was made on behalf of the legislator who replaced the person in the report or the expenditure actually was for the person named, although since the person had left office no lobbyist expenditure report was required.

  7. In even-numbered years, MEC maintains lobbyist expenditure reports for legislators elected to office in November, but who will not take office until January of the next year. These reports are not included in MDN's display for public officials since, technically, they are not public officials until they take office.

  8. In addition to expenditures made for specific public officials, a lobbyist can list a legislative group as the recipient. It can be a committee, caucus or the entire General Assembly. Unfortunately, these group reports do not indicate which legislators actually eat the meals or accepted the gifts. One year, for example, an out-of-state trip which listed the entire legislature as the group whose travel costs were covered by the lobbyist, only a few lawmakers actually took the trip.

"Clean Missouri" Effects

Since Missouri voters approved the "Clean Missouri" ballot issue that included sever restrictions on lobbyist expenditures, the amount of lobbyist expenditures has decreased dramatically.

From more than $1 million of lobbyist expenditures in 2017, lobbyists reported spending just $10,000 in 2020.

In 2021, only seven exenditures were reported for January and all were for local officials -- nothing for legislators or statewide officials.

Clean Missouri imposed a $5 limit on a public official from receiving a lobbyist expenditure.

The limit is annually inflation adjusted. Also, the limit does not put a limit on the number of seperate expenditures a public officials can receive from a lobbyist.

Also, the limit does not cover local officals.

Also, lobbyist expenditures that were solicited by public officials has ceased completely.