Mike Sanders’ kickback scheme raises a question: Are other Missouri politicians gaming the system?

The news that former Jackson County Executive Mike Sanders had engineered a campaign kickback scheme that put tens of thousands of dollars in his pocket raises a troubling question:

Are other Missouri politicians doing exactly the same thing?

As The Star’s Mike Hendricks and Steve Vockrodt pointed out last week, the task of padding one’s pocket doesn’t have to be complicated. Sanders merely lined up a longtime friend and had checks written to him from a campaign account that Sanders controlled. The friend cashed the checks, kept a few hundred bucks and gave the rest of the money to Sanders.

That the friend, Steve Hill, is a quadriplegic living on disability only adds an element of pathos to the scheme.

“I thought about it for a minute,” Hill said when Sanders proposed the arrangement. “What the hell? All right, I’m in a wheelchair, man. I’m hurting for a few bucks. And $200 or $300 would help me out.”

It’s the job of the Missouri Ethics Commission to monitor campaign spending in the state. And what a task that is. Hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into the accounts of Missouri candidates and political committees in 2016. Today, the lineup includes 973 candidate committees, 222 political party committees and 834 political action committees. Altogether, there are a staggering 2,382 committees in the state, and the numbers are growing.

Maybe that begins to explain why commission staff wasn’t on top of all the transactions between Hill and the Integrity in Law Enforcement committee that Sanders formed in 2004 when he became Jackson County prosecutor. The series of payments to Hill amounted to little more than the proverbial needle in a haystack.

These days, the commission’s staff includes two auditors and two investigators — and that’s an upgrade from mid-year when the commission had but one auditor. The commission sought the increase because of a new state law that requires the hundreds of local candidate committees to file reports with the agency. Also pitching in are four staffers who answer questions and help candidates and lobbyists file reports.

All this suggests that the Ethics Commission has a lot on its plate at a time when more money than ever is sloshing around state politics. The Sanders case is a timely reminder that outright corruption and money and power too often go hand in hand. We must be vigilant.

To that end, the Ethics Commission needs to do more to keep tabs on candidates and their committees. One way to stave off more Mike Sanders cases and send a strong message to politicos of all stripes would be to institute random audits of campaign committees. Auditors would drill down to check the veracity of expenditures that so often are described on campaign reports with just a single, vague word: “Consulting.” “Lodging.” “Airfare.” “Storage.” “Tickets.” “Administration.” “Plane rental.”

Such a change would require a minor tweak of state law to permit such random reviews. It would also require the hiring of half-a-dozen auditors if the goal was to review, say, 40 reports a year. That would represent precisely 1.7 percent of all the committees out there.

That’s a reasonable requirement to ensure the integrity of Missouri’s political system. As the Mike Sanders’ case demonstrates, with so much money in politics these days, that integrity hangs by a string.

This story was originally published December 13, 2017 at 1:19 PM with the headline "Mike Sanders’ kickback scheme raises a question: Are other Missouri politicians gaming the system?."