Photo: Juan Figueroa, Houston Chronicle / Staff Photographer

AUSTIN — Texas state Rep. Ron Reynolds was running for his fourth term when in early 2016 he abruptly stopped reporting his finances to the state. He didn’t file another report for about two years, keeping secret the amount of money he raised during that time and the identities of those who gave it to him.

Reynolds, D-Missouri City, is one of about a hundred candidates, lobbyists and political action committee treasurers each year who fail to file mandatory disclosures of their donors and expenses, racking up thousands of dollars in fines as a result, according to an analysis by Hearst Newspapers.

Yet candidates with unpaid fines can continue to run for office and the committees can go on operating, thanks to a weak enforcement system that allows them to dodge their responsibility to the state and voters. Reynolds still owes over $74,000 as he runs for re-election this year.

The Texas Attorney General’s Office, which handles collections for the Texas Ethics Commission, since 2005 has won the right in court to collect $1.1 million from late filers, including Reynolds, but the office has then written off $800,000 as uncollectible, effectively ending attempts to financially penalize candidates and political committees.

“Campaign finance in Texas is basically a wild west, no rules system,” said Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, an advocacy group that seeks to reduce the influence of money in politics. “Only in the most extreme circumstances do you see people being held accountable.”

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It’s rare for office holders like Reynolds to allow their fines to pile up. Elected officials, including judges and legislators, make up a small portion of the total outstanding fines, the majority of which are owed by candidates who lost, lobbyists and PAC treasurers.

Still, the state’s lack of enforcement could give candidates and politicians with unpaid fines little motivation to pay up or account for their fundraising in 2020, a competitive election that could tip the scales of power in Texas for years to come. The campaign finance reports are required by law because they reveal where candidates are getting their money in a state with few limits on contributions, which has meant some have received checks as high as $1 million from individual donors.

Reynolds, a personal injury attorney who has been in the Legislature since 2011, has yet to file the missing campaign reports, Texas Ethics Commission records show. Meanwhile, the attorney general’s office has gone to court seven times trying to collect fines from Reynolds since 2008.

Those court judgments are supposed to act as an incentive for a candidate to pay because they can inhibit a person’s ability to get a loan or lower their credit score, the attorney general’s office said.

Reynolds, however, said the lawsuits haven’t negatively impacted his credit score or affected his job as a state representative. Just one of the fines for $9,400 has been paid back in full; Reynolds said he is making payments toward the rest of the debt, but he did not respond to a request that he provide proof of payment. The attorney general’s office did not respond to a request for confirmation. Reynolds has not missed reporting deadlines in the last year.

He said he plans to file the missing campaign finance reports next month, explaining that the fines accrued after he missed filing deadlines when his mother was in intensive care, when he was in the hospital and when he was out of the country.

In 2018, Reynolds served nearly four months in jail for illegally soliciting clients for his law practice and was released in time for the beginning of the 2019 legislative session. He has been disbarred in Texas but is appealing the decision.

“My constituents appreciate the fact that I'm very engaged and responsive to their concerns,” he said in a statement. “I plan to stay focused on fighting for my constituents and not distracted by old fines that I'm already in the process of paying off.”

In 2018, 22 percent of people fined actually paid up

The attorney general’s office said it does all it can to collect the fines, by blocking elected officials from receiving reimbursements from the state or filing lawsuits when fees are hefty enough to justify the legal cost, before labeling them uncollectible. While those facing steep fines are cut off from state contracts and reimbursements, delinquent lawmakers can continue to collect their salaries and per diem checks.

Other states such as New York, California and Florida can garnish wages, levy tax liens or even send collections agencies after debtors, but Texas regulators have none of those options. State law provides the civil courts as the only remedy for collecting unpaid fines. Once the Texas Attorney General deems fines uncollectible, the debt stays on the books and could still be paid one day, but there are no enforcement options left for the agency to take, officials said.

Dozens of lobbyists, judges and lawmakers have paid off their debts, some of which reach tens of thousands of dollars. But plenty of other candidates and officials — representing all political parties — have not.

Of the cases closed in 2018, about 22 percent of candidates and officials paid their fines in full. The rest were either waived by the commission or otherwise uncollectible at least in part.

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Chad Craycraft, chair of the Texas Ethics Commission, said he believes the attorney general’s office does all it can to collect.

“I have complete confidence that the attorney general’s office takes all referrals made by the Texas Ethics Commission and other state agencies seriously and after evaluating each individually, pursues the course of action that it deems is in the best interest of the State of Texas,” Craycraft said.

Candidates have several opportunities to avoid a fine levied by the ethics commission. If they fail to report campaign spending on time, candidates can request the ethics commission waive the fine after they turn in the late report.

That happens quite often: About 15 percent of overdue fines, or about $535,000, since 2005 have been absolved by the agency after it originally referred them to the attorney general’s office for collections, records show.

States with tougher laws have no problem collecting

State Board of Education Board Member Georgina Perez is one of the more than 300 people whose fines were dropped in the last decade. Perez said she had a technical issue with submitting her disclosure forms that was later resolved.

Perez said she was very concerned about having a fine on her record and dealt with the issue immediately, but even if she hadn’t, the hold on her reimbursements for board-related travel and other expenses likely would have been “highly effective” — especially since she has to make the 1,100-mile round trip drive from El Paso to Austin many times a year for board meetings.

“They would have gotten that $11,000,” she said.

In Florida, the state can recover unpaid fines through salary withholding, wage garnishment or referral to a collection agency, though the ethics commission’s deputy executive director Kerrie Stillman said it has not been forced to garnish wages yet. Most cases are resolved before then, though, and the state has a 99 percent compliance rate, according to its 2018 report.

Similarly, the vast majority of cases in California are settled through its Fair Political Practices Commission. Respondents can contest a finding of a violation before an administrative law judge.

In about a half-dozen cases per year in the state, the respondent either fails to come to a settlement or evades the commission. At that point, the commission can vote to send the unpaid fines to a division focused on collections. By law, that division can levy a property tax lien or garnish tax refunds from the Franchise Tax Board and Internal Revenue Service.

“The Political Reform Act and FPPC have been in existence for 46 years,” said spokesman Jay Wierenga about his state’s high level of compliance. “So the political community at large is pretty well-aware of the requirements and laws and regulations.”

The majority of cases in New York are also resolved by settlement. A spokesman for the New York State Joint Commission on Public Ethics, Walter McClure, said only a couple cases have been sent to the attorney general in recent years.

Asked whether there is more the Texas Ethics Commission could do, administratively or through a legislative change, to collect overdue fines, Craycraft, the commission’s chair, declined to comment, saying only that it is “not a policy-making agency.”

Gutierrez, of Common Cause, said there is no political will for creating a more heavily regulated money-in-politics system in Texas. The attorney general’s office has been dismissive of the commission, such as in 2018 when it declined to represent it in a court case filed by the conservative advocacy group Empower Texans that seeks to gut the agency.

The attorney general’s office at the time called into question whether the commission has the constitutional right to enforce state election laws and penalize those who violate them.

“We take the duty to defend the state seriously and routinely defend agency enforcement actions whenever consistent with our duty to uphold the Constitution,” said the attorney general’s spokesman Marc Rylander at the time. “However, where we determine those two duties are in conflict, our first obligation is to defend the Constitution and the basic rights it guarantees to each and every Texan.”

That makes it unlikely the commission, which Gutierrez described as one of the most toothless Texas agencies, will see change.

“To me, it is really a product of state leadership that doesn’t want to have regulations on campaign finance, doesn’t believe money in politics is a problem,” he said, “and they have set up a system to reflect that.

taylor.goldenstein@chron.com