State House passes legislation giving boost to ethics investigators

The Georgia House passed legislation Friday aimed at giving state ethics investigators more tools to make cases and clarifying that some uses for leftover campaign money are illegal.

House Bill 333, sponsored by Judiciary Chairman Chuck Efstration, R-dacula, addresses issues raised by two ongoing high-profile cases that have made headlines in recent years.

One involves former longtime Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine, a Republican front-runner in the 2010 gubernatorial race who has been fighting ethics charges for more than a decade.

The other involves former Republican state Senate leader Dan Balfour, who left office in 2015 and didn’t report what he did with $630,000 in leftover campaign money. By law, former politicians aren’t allowed to keep the money for personal use.

“Ensuring there is transparency and oversight in our campaign finance law is a very important thing,” Efstration told colleagues before they passed his bill 164-0. “It helps ensure public trust in our government.”

Under Efstration’s bill, he said, the commission would have more time to make cases without the statute of limitations running out, would make ex-candidates hold on to campaign bank records longer, would clarify that candidates could not use campaign contributions to make personal loans to themselves or invest in their companies, and would mandate what candidates could do with money raised for primary or general election runoffs when they fail to make the runoffs.

While the bill doesn’t name the two former politicians, some of the issues raised by the legislation were brought up in their cases.

Following an Atlanta Journal-constitution report, a complaint was filed against Oxendine’s gubernatorial campaign in 2009 alleging that he accepted $120,000 in bundled contributions from two Georgia insurance companies.