Twenty-Eight Months Later…

As the political world fixates on the indictment of a bundler for Comptroller John Liu’s 2013 mayoral campaign, a source notes that a lot of unanswered questions remain from an election that happened nearly 28 months ago.

All three citywide elected officials – Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and Liu – have some outstanding intrigue surrounding their 2009 campaign spending. But the Campaign Finance Board, which oversees the campaign spending of all candidates that run for New York City office, has issued audits for none of them.

And those campaigns are far from the only ones who have not gotten back reports about their campaign spending (or, perhaps, misspending).

Starting the January after an election day, the CFB by law has 14 months to finish audits for Council elections – and 16 months for citywide candidates. It’s now been nearly 26 months since January 2010, but under city law, the CFB is allowed to take longer if more back-and-forth is needed to receive required documentation from candidates.

Out of about 210 audits expected to be released from the 2009 elections, 145 have been completed. Most, if not all, of the potentially controversial ones – which could have consequences for candidates eying higher office like Liu and de Blasio – have yet to come back.

Bloomberg’s payment of more than $1 million to the Independence Party, which was stolen by convicted political operative John Haggerty, raised questions about whether Bloomberg himself may have improperly paid for election day operations. The CFB agreed to hold off auditing Bloobmerg’s campaign until Haggerty’s trial was finished.

Recent reports have raised questions about Liu’s 2009 campaign spending, including his donations from disgraced fundraiser Norman Hsu and donations to pay off his campaign debt that appear to exceed the legal limit. And Oliver Pan, the bundler that was just indicted, allegedly told an undercover agent that he had used “straw donors” to pump up Liu’s campaign coffers in the past as well.

Meanwhile, de Blasio and other candidates’ use of Data & Field Services, the for-profit GOTV operation set up by the Working Families Party for its favored candidates, sparked questions about whether those candidates got cut-rate campaign services — and led to a federal investigation. (The WFP was ultimately cleared of criminal wrongdoing, but agreed to dissolve the company after it was found to have violated a settlement agreement.)

None of the audits for the seven candidates who used DFS – de Blasio, Debi Rose, Brad Lander, Jimmy Van Bramer, Lynn Schulman, Jumaane Williams and S.J. Jung – have been issued by the CFB. The audit of Rose, whose campaign spending was the subject of a lawsuit and sparked the ultimate dissolution of DFS, could be especially interesting.

The CFB is known to be very meticulous in its audits, demanding that every cent of taxpayer matching funds be properly spent — and it also does not comment on the status of ongoing audits.