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The Alabama Lenders Association hosted more than a dozen lawmakers and the chairman of the Alabama Ethics Commission at its 2014 conference at the Beau Rivage resort and casino in Biloxi, Mississippi, but the special interest group never reported what they spent on officials there until after they were caught. Never the less, the Alabama Ethics Commission helped them amend their reports and didn't admit doing so until after public records revealed what happened.

(Beau Rivage)

The thing you're looking for is always in the last place you look, right? Obviously.

But sometimes, when you're searching for that missing thing -- your car keys or your glasses, maybe -- you look in one place, and it's not there the first time, and then a few minutes later, you look again in that same place, and there it is.

Weird, right?

That's happened to all of us, and earlier this summer it happened to me, but I wasn't looking for my keys or glasses. This time, I was looking for public records through the Alabama Ethics Commission.

In July I wrote a column about how the Alabama Lenders Association had paid for more than a dozen lawmakers to attend its annual conference at the posh Grove Park Inn in Asheville, N.C.

When doing the reporting for that column, I requested from the Alabama Ethics Commission all the organization's quarterly reports of lobbying activities. Under Alabama law, organizations such as the Alabama Lenders are required to report when they or their lobbyists spend more than $250 in a day on a public official.

The records I got back showed the Alabama Lenders had reported no such spending, even though, as I knew at the time, the organization had been taking lawmakers on trips like these for years, and to places where the cheapest hotel room would push them over the $250 line.

Last month, I looked again, and whaddayaknow?

There were the reports, and this time, they showed a lot more spending.

Suspecting that something funny was going on, I asked for more documents. Here's what those documents revealed.

Even the updated reports do not reflect what exactly the Alabama Lenders Association spent on public officials attending its conferences. While the updated reports itemize lodging and meals, they also include line items for unnamed activities in which lawmakers might or might not have taken part.

Now you don't see it, now you do

The way the Ethics Commission's system works, anyone can request a lobbyist or principal's quarterly reports by filling out an online form. Ethics Commission employees then query a database and generate a report, which they email to you. That email contains links to the reports, which expire three days later.

That's what I did on July 7 and I received a report from the Ethics Commission showing the Alabama Lenders Association had not reported any spending.

On July 8, the Ethics Commission's lobbyist liaison, Vicky Manning, sent an email to the Alabama Lenders Association asking them if their reports were accurate.

"Could you please confirm the reports filed for the Alabama Lenders Association for the period of 2014-2016 are correct and if there were or were not any reportable expenditures?" she wrote.

The next day, an assistant for Maurice Shevin, the director of the Alabama Lenders Association, wrote back a one-sentence email.

"How do we file an amended report for 2015 and 2014?" she replied.

Let's be clear. Before this exchange, the Alabama Lenders Association had filed reports with the Ethics Commission. It wasn't a matter that they had forgotten. Rather, those reports were inaccurate.

Intentionally filing a false report with the Alabama Ethics Commission is a crime, Commission Director Tom Albritton says.

Whether the bogus reports were intentional or not, the Alabama Lenders Association didn't file amended reports until July 14, two days after AL.com reported the 2016 junket to Asheville N.C. The records on file with the commission show they were received there on July 18.

After the Alabama Ethics Commission realized the Alabama Lenders Association had filed inaccurate reports, a crime if intentional, the Commission didn't notify the Alabama Media Group that those reports were incomplete, even though it was AMG's request that prompted the Commission to investigate.

Not even a friendly "Hello"

This week, I asked Albritton how all this back and forth went down.

"As it appears the Commission contacted the Alabama Lenders Association a day after I requested and received the Lenders Association's reports, why wasn't I notified that the reports I received were inaccurate or that they were being amended?" I asked in an email. (Yes, the comma splice is mine.)

His reply didn't exactly answer the question.

"Your questions prompted me to ask my staff to verify whether the filings were accurate and their response after looking was that they couldn't tell," he wrote back. "Frankly, armed with that knowledge I felt I'd be derelict in my duty if I didn't follow up on your concerns and investigate."

OK, but what about my question?

The Commission knew that I had requested the Alabama Lenders Association's reports. They knew that those reports, which they sent me, were incomplete.

During my snooping around, I asked if something funny was going on.

"[W]hen I queried these reports previously, they showed no reported spending by the Alabama Lenders or their lobbyists before the second quarter of 2016, but now there's a report showing spending for the second quarter of 2015," I wrote in an email to Manning on Aug. 2. "Has the AL Lenders Association or their lobbyists submitted updated reports recently?"

Remember, this is the lobbyist liaison who, just three weeks earlier, had helped the Alabama Lenders Association correct their bogus reports. She also answered with a non-answer.

"The Commission is currently in the process of getting ready for our meeting tomorrow," she wrote. "I will forward your email to the Executive Director. He will review this and get back with you as soon as he can."

Just to be clear, after the Alabama Ethics Commission realized the Alabama Lenders Association had filed inaccurate reports, a crime if intentional, the Commission didn't notify AL.com that those reports were incomplete, even though it was AL.com's request that prompted the Commission to investigate.

Never in this process was there any "Hey, by the way ... ."

The only one here to get anything like that seems to have been the Alabama Lender's Association.

The Alabama Ethics Commission should have known. After all, a commissioner was on the trip.

Who's watching?

The Commission should have been paying attention. After all, it wasn't just Alabama lawmakers going off on these junkets. According to the disclosures, there was Brig. Gen. Ed Crowell (Ret.). Until a little more than a year ago, Crowell was the chairman of the Alabama Ethics Commission.

That's right, the chairman of the Alabama Ethics Commission was on a junket approved by the Alabama Ethics Commission as a "widely-attended event."

The updated disclosures also erroneously show that current Ethics Commission Chairman Jerry Fielding was on the trip, too. However, Fielding has given AL.com proof that he was, in fact, in Texas at the time, and the director of the Alabama Lenders Association, Shevin, says that he included Fielding, who was a state senator at the time of the Biloxi conference, and another lawmaker on the Ethics Commission disclosures by mistake.

Typically, at this point in the column, I'd explain how special interest groups like the Alabama Lenders Association are exploiting a loophole in Alabama's ethics law to take public officials on fancy, expensive trips to expensive out-of-state resorts. (It's legal, but barely.)

And this is the point where I'd question whether you, Mr. and Ms. Citizen Taxpayer, get the same kind of attention from those public officials as the special interest groups like these. (You don't.)

And here is where I'd shame those public officials for following the smell of free dinners and lavender-scented hotel beds instead of staying on the straight and narrow. (They have no shame, so why bother?)

But we've been through all that before.

What is becoming more and more apparent is that the real problem here is a breakdown at the Alabama Ethics Commission.

I've had more than one lobbyist ask my why I'm picking on the poor Alabama Lenders Association when there are so many other special interest groups doing the same sorts of things. The answer is that I haven't gotten to the others yet.

You see, I've put in other requests to the Commission for the same sorts of records for other interest groups, and just like with the Alabama Lenders Association, their reports have shown a bunch of zeroes. These are interest groups who hold the same sort of conferences at the same sorts of hotels with the same sorts of attendees. (I don't want to call anybody out by name, but if your initials are B.C.A, you might want to make sure your reports are correct.)

And nada.

Alabama's ethics law was supposed to force lobbyists to report who they're spending big money on, but what happens when nobody is enforcing it?

The Alabama Ethics Commission was supposed to be the repository for all this data, but what is that data worth if it isn't complete or accurate?

The Commission was supposed to have our backs, but it is failing. Instead, on most days, it's a con job to make us think someone is watching out for us, but it's not.

Someone -- the Attorney General or State Auditor, for instance -- should take a look.

And then look again.

You can view some of the documents behind this story here, here and here.

This column was edited Sept. 9, 2016, to reflect that Fielding was not at the Biloxi conference. The director of the Alabama Lenders Association, Maurice Shevin, told AL.com that, when filing the lobbying activity reports with the Alabama Ethics Commission, he included the names of lawmakers who had indicated that they would attend, not necessarily those who were actually in attendance. Further, Fielding has given proof to AL.com that he was actually in Texas with family at the time of the conference.