Herbert's office misses online disclosure deadline

Lt. Gov. Gary Herbert may want to investigate a scofflaw who missed an important campaign finance disclosure deadline. Who is that violator? Herbert's office itself.

It missed a 5 p.m. Tuesday deadline to have online all of the year-end reports filed by candidates and office holders a week ago. Herbert's office is struggling with computer bugs in a new computer system that continues to generate incorrect summaries and totals for amounts raised and spent by candidates.

Joe Demma, chief of staff for Herbert, said his office and the state's Department of Technology Service have been working 20 hours a day during the past week to "take a Web site that was a catastrophic failure and get it to a place that hopefully within a day or two will be working like it should have been six months ago."

Despite their efforts, they could not repair the system in time to meet the statutory deadline to have all data filed last week online by Tuesday at 5 p.m.

Demma said no penalty exists for missing that deadline. "We've never missed it before," he said.

Demma added that the only choices the office had because of ongoing computer glitches was to post "no information or incorrect information. And I suspect that legislators and candidates alike would agree that they would rather have their information up correct than not."

Demma said the office expects to have the glitches repaired in a day or two. Meanwhile, he said all reports are available for inspection in the lieutenant governor's office, or its staff can e-mail or fax information from specific reports upon request.

As office holders attempted to file disclosure forms last week, many complained to the Deseret News that they could not do it online (as they have been able to in recent years) because of the new computer system ?— and had to quickly file it on paper instead.

The newspaper also found that summaries of amounts spent and raised were often off by tens of thousands of dollars by each candidate compared to the original forms they filed.

So Herbert's office took most of the information off of the Internet, and its Web site has said in recent days merely that the system was "under maintenance" as it has worked to correct problems.

E-mail: lee@desnews.com