There’s new trouble with the secretary of state’s campaign finance reporting system, the Albuquerque Journal is reporting.
From the newspaper:
“Elected holders of state and county offices, candidates for those offices and political action committees couldn’t use the system to file their finance reports due April 11.
“The snafu comes just a year after the system was brought online, and it means the public currently can’t use the system and its search capabilities to review campaign contributions and expenditures for the period of Nov. 28 to April 4.”
The Secretary of State’s Office hopes to have the problem fixed in about six weeks, according to the newspaper.
What exactly is the problem? Here’s the explanation, from the Journal’s Thomas J. Cole:
“Ken Ortiz, chief of staff for Secretary of State Dianna Duran, said the office discovered about three months ago that the system hadn’t been configured to accept the April 11 reports from officeholders, candidates and PACs.
“Ortiz said the office decided against moving immediately to fix the problem because the Legislature was considering changes in the number and timing of campaign finance reports to be filed in nonelection years like 2011.
“Simply put, the Secretary of State’s Office didn’t want its government contractor to configure the system to accept the April reports, only to be told a short time later that it needed to reconfigure the system for other reports. The Legislature didn’t change the reporting requirements before adjourning in mid-March.”
The Journal reported that candidates were able to file their finance reports in another way – on a spreadsheet or using printed forms – but those numbers aren’t inputted into the system’s searchable database.
Ortiz told the Journal his office will manually input the data from the April 11 reports into the system once it’s configured to accept reports from that date.
In the meantime, you can find the April 11 reports by clicking here.