Thursday, May 22, 2008

Pot. Kettle. Black. Redux.

Well, boys and girls, we all know that the Republican Party of Minnesota has been facing some trouble lately on its bookkeeping practices. A bit of an overview can be seen here.

It seems that after that Al-Franken's-accounting-is-goofy brouhaha, the Republican Party of Minnesota decided that they would indeed turn the accountants and auditors on their own... well, issues.

What did it reveal, you ask. It seems that we're not privy to the actual audit. We mere members of the public are stuck with the amended filings that the RPM has filed just this week with the FEC. The amended filings that consist of an amended filing for every single reporting period since the beginning of the year 2002. Every monthly report, every quarterly report, every pre- and post-election report, and every year end report. The amendments only go through the end of 2006, but it's a pretty good guess we'll be seeing more. You can see on the FEC website that since early May, more than 60 amended reports have been filed.

So many amendments, so little time. But the one that jumps out is the one for the 2006 year end report. In the original year end 2006 report, filed on January 19, 2007, the ending cash on hand was $136,614.03. Then in an amended report filed on February 20, 2007, the ending cash on hand was $2,751,965.73. You can find them in this chart. But in the most recent filing from just this week, the ending cash on hand is listed as -$28,325.04. Yes, grasshopper, that's a negative $28,325.04 for the cash on hand at the close of the reporting period. Somewhere, $2,780,290.77 became... well, let's just say it's unaccounted for.

And yes, Grasshopper, on the very day this week that the Republican Party of Minnesota was filing these amended reports, May 21, its Chairman continued to issue outraged-filled press releases about Al Franken's supposedly sloppy accounting.

Update: This post was updated because I can't get the links to work. Go to the FEC website site and search for "Republican Party of Minnesota."

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