Do Utah payday lenders use cash to fend off regulations?

A watchdog group says "payday lenders" might continually escape tighter regulation in Utah because of the growing political donations made by their high-interest-rate industry.

But such Utah lenders say that study is unscholarly and poorly documented, and say efforts to restrict their industry have failed mostly because such proposals would have hurt consumers — not because of their political donations.

MAPLight.org, a California-based nonpartisan group that says it seeks to illuminate connections between money and politics, looked at donations from payday lenders nationwide. But it focused on seven states where it said the percentage of overall donations that came from payday lenders was higher than elsewhere: Utah, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas.

"We found that during the last eight years, as total industry campaign contributions in these states increased, state laws allowed the industry to continue operating without significant restrictions," it said in a new study.

It said payday lenders gave $76,200 to state-level candidates in Utah between the 1996 and 2006 elections. That was less than half a percent of all money donated in that time, but it was a higher percentage than was given in most states.

The study said that about a dozen bills were proposed but failed in the Utah Legislature in that time either to cap the high interest rates the industry charges or to more tightly regulate it. However, it said three bills with relatively minor restrictions did pass.

Cort Walker, spokesman for the Utah Consumer Lending Association, which represents local payday lenders, complained the study does not identify well its sources of information — including exactly whom it considered to be payday lenders, so it is impossible to verify its information.

(The study numbers may indeed have problems — but payday lenders may have actually given more than it said. The Deseret Morning News in a quick, noncomprehensive look at databases Tuesday, identified at least $95,000 that such lenders gave in Utah in the period. About 20 percent came of that from out of state. But the study identified only about $76,000, and said 85 percent of it came from out of state.)

Walker said some of the study's descriptions of bills at the Legislature were also faulty. He also said most bills to tighten regulation of the industry failed "because they actually would have ended up hurting the consumer. That's why they don't pass. The bills that pass are the ones that make sense."