The progressive organization MoveOn.org has reached an agreement with the Federal Election Commission to pay $43,000 in civil penalties for failing to notify the agency about independent expenditures totaling over half a million dollars during the 2008 election.
MoveOn and its treasurer Wes Boyd maintain in the agreement that “inadvertent administrative or technical errors” caused them not to file 48-hour notices for 12 independent expenditures totaling $557,082.36.
“MoveOn.org contends that for unknown reasons, some of the Notices were not uploaded and received by the Commission even though MoveOn.org had prepared electronic submissions using FECfile software,” according to the agreement, which was signed in July by announced by the FEC in their weekly update on Friday afternoon.
Late update: Justin Ruben, the executive director of MoveOn, issued a statement to TPM that blames the violations on a software malfunction and said they had no clue the reports weren’t uploaded until the FEC got in touch with them.
Here’s the full statement:
Due to what we believe was a software glitch, four out of dozens of independent expenditure reports we prepared during the 2008 campaign did not properly reach the FEC even though they were prepared in an accurate and timely manner. It should be noted all of these expenditures were disclosed on our regular reports and most of them were disclosed on reports that were filed prior to Election Day. We did not realize that these reports had not properly uploaded to the FEC until the FEC contacted us about this after the 2008 election. Since then we have been working with the FEC to resolve this issue, the end result being today’s letter.
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