Does business group's use of "dark money" for its political action committee follow state ethics ...

by Jay Root and Ryan Murphy, Texas Tribune

Does business group's use of "dark money" for its political action committee follow state ethics rules?

The Texas Association of Business, the state’s de facto chamber of commerce, hasn’t been reluctant to talk about its opposition to last year’s “bathroom bill” that sought to define which bathrooms transgender people could use, its criticism of state-based immigration laws or its eternal skepticism of higher taxes and expanded government regulations.

The group has not been as forthcoming about who’s funding its political action committee.

For years, the business association's political arm has received hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of corporate “dark money” contributions — amounting to nearly half of its receipts since 2000 — from an affiliated nonprofit that doesn’t disclose its donors, a Texas Tribune investigation has found.

The nonprofit corporation, known as the Committee to Inform Voters on Issues and Candidates (CIVIC), has provided at least $822,000 in donations to the TAB Political Action Committee since 2003, according to a Tribune analysis of filings at the Texas Ethics Commission. That’s 47 percent of the $1.7 million the group has taken in since the state began making digital campaign finance records available nearly two decades ago.

Read more: https://www.texastribune.org/2018/01/29/does-texas-business-groups-use-dark-money-follow-state-ethics-rules/