Alabama lawmakers will consider a bill that would repeal and replace the Alabama ethics act, the first major revisions in more than a decade to the law intended to prevent elected officials and public employees from using their offices for personal gain.
Rep. Matt Simpson, a Republican from Baldwin County who is sponsoring the bill, drafted and revised it after months of study and public meetings. Simpson said it will clarify the law for the hundreds of thousands of public officials, public employees, teachers, and their family members who fall under it.
“We just want people to know, here’s the line, if you cross it, this is what you’re facing,” Simpson said. “We want people to know, this is what you can do, this is what you can’t do.”
Alabama Ethics Commission Executive Director Tom Albritton said Simpson’s bill, HB227, will open loopholes and weaken the law. Albritton distributed a one-page summary of the Ethics Commission’s objections to the bill.
“HB227 is a blatant attempt to water down the Ethics Act, and it will enable corruption in the state of Alabama,” the summary says. “HB227 hides under the guise of seeking ‘clarity.’ However, it provides no such thing. (Simpson) says that he wants people to know ‘where the lines are’ but he effectively removed the lines altogether.”
The House of Representatives is scheduled to debate Simpson’s bill when lawmakers return from spring break Tuesday.
The Ethics Commission works somewhat like a grand jury. The agency’s staff investigates complaints alleging violations of the ethics law and campaign finance law and presents cases to the appointed, five-member commission, which determines whether there is probable cause that the law was broken. The commission does not determine guilt but forwards cases to the attorney general or a district attorney.
HB227 would reduce the scope of the Ethics Commission’s authority. It would remove from the ethics law the crime of using office for personal gain. Instead, those cases would be handled by district attorneys or the attorney general under a bribery law or a new law creating the crime of using public office for pecuniary benefit.
Under HB227, the Ethics Commission would have jurisdiction on cases involving conflicts of interest, improperly steering government contracts and benefits, and restrictions on gifts to public officials. Violations would result in civil penalties, although the commission could still notify the attorney general or district attorney of possible criminal violations.
Albritton said the bill would expand exceptions to the ban on gifts to public officials that would make the ban meaningless.
For example, it would narrow the definition of a public official’s family members to spouses and dependents. The definition in the current ethics law includes spouses, dependents, adult children and their spouses, parents, spouse’s parents, and siblings and their spouses.
Simpson said that change is an example of making the law simpler and more fair. Simpson said, for example, he should not be subject to prosecution because somebody buys a meal for his father-in-law. He said it is more reasonable to hold a public official accountable for gifts and things of value given to their spouse or dependent children.
Albritton said the bill would loosen a friendship except to the restriction on gifts. The current ethics law says the friendship exception applies “under circumstances which make it clear that it is motivated by a friendship and not given because of the recipient’s official position.” Relevant factors include whether the friendship started and gifts were exchanged before the recipient became a public official.
Simpson said his bill only changed the burden of proof, requiring the prosecution to show that a gift was not the result of friendship. Albritton said that’s an important distinction.
“That changed standard of proof really matters here,” Albritton said. “It creates a loophole that pretty much anybody can walk through.”
Simpson pointed to sections of the bill that he said showed it would provide thorough safeguards against corruption. For example, it prohibits a public servant from steering contracts, grants, or financial business from the public servant’s government body to a business the public servant is associated with or any family member, including a child, parent, sibling, grandchild, grandparent, aunt , uncle, niece, nephew, cousin, or spouse, or the child, parent, or sibling of the spouse.
The new section on using a public office for pecuniary benefits applies the law to a benefit that goes to anyone, not just the public official, Simpson noted.
“This is not a weakening of the ethics bill,” Simpson said. “This is a strengthening the ethics laws bill. This is not something where we’re trying to make it where everybody can go and get what they want.”
There are numerous exceptions to the restrictions on gifts and favors offered to public officials both in the current law and in Simpson’s bill.
The current law allows gifts of up to $32 per occasion, an amount that is periodically adjusted by inflation. Simpson’s bill would raise that to $100 for a single occasion, or $500 total during a 12-month period.
The current law allows legislators and other public officials to have their expenses paid for transportation, lodging, food, and beverages at events defined as economic development or educational functions. Simpson’s bill retains allowances for such events.
Alabama lawmakers have proposed and made changes to the ethics law in recent years, but the last major revisions came in 2010, when a newly elected Republican majority in the Legislature passed sweeping reforms, fulfilling a campaign promise they said would help stamp out corruption. The stricter laws were a factor in the conviction of former House Speaker Mike Hubbard on 12 ethics violations in 2016.
The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals and the Alabama Supreme Court overturned a total of six of Hubbard’s convictions and urged the Legislature to clarify the law.
Supreme Court Justice Tommy Bryan wrote that parts of the ethics law are “inexplicably broad and somewhat confusing.”
“Thus, I encourage the legislature to take immediate action to once again revise and clarify the language of the Ethics Code,” Bryan wrote in the 2020 decision.
Simpson said the court’s opinion was among the factors considered in HB227. For example, his bill narrows the definition of principal, a person or company that hires a lobbyist. That definition is one of the sections in the current law the courts say was too broad.
Simpson is a lawyer and prosecutor who was elected to the House in 2018. Shortly after his election, Simpson said he learned about what he considers the confusing nature of the ethics act during a legislative orientation session. He said three lawyers conducting the session repeatedly gave different answers to the legislators’ questions about what the law prohibits.
“One person would say, ‘Yes, you can do it.’ One person would say, ‘No, you can’t do that,’ and another person would say, Well it depends, maybe,’” Simpson said.
“That just doesn’t make sense. Why is it so hard for people to understand what you can and can’t do?” Simpson said.
Simpson made the Ethics Act a priority when he became chairman of the House Ethics and Campaign Finance after the previous chairman, Rep. Mike Ball, retired when his term ends in 2022.
The committee held hearings and began work on the ethics bill after the 2023 regular session ended.
“I learned that 300,000 people directly fall under the ethics laws as they are now, meaning every county, state, city employee that falls under the ethics laws,” Simpson said. “By the time you include their extended family the numbers in that report indicated it was over a million people, which is roughly a quarter of the population.”
Simpson said he’s concerned that many of those people don’t understand the law.
“I have been practicing law for almost 20 years, including prosecuting some of these cases,” Simpson said. “If I still can’t figure out what we’ve got to do, and what I can do and what I can’t do, and I still have to call the Ethics Commission and keep them on speed dial to get guidance and advice , what chance does the teacher have? What chance do the first responders have? What chance does your average city employee have of knowing what they can and can’t do?”
Albritton said the Ethics Commission is responsive to questions from those affected by the law and how it applies through hundreds of informal opinions it issues every year. Simpson’s bill would require the commission to publish a summary of those informal opinions on its website.
Albritton said a major concern about HB227 is that it would strip the Ethics Commission of its independence by empowering the Legislative Council, a committee of 20 state lawmakers, to impeach the Ethics Commission director after a recommendation by the attorney general.
“It would make me subject to impeachment by somebody we regulate under the Ethics Act,” Albritton said.
Albritton said that undermines a fundamental principle that’s been part of Alabama’s ethics law since it was first enacted in 1973, a principle he said is nationally recognized.
Simpson said he believes the additional check on the Ethics Commission is warranted.
“There’s no government job, where you can just act as king without anybody having to answer to the people,” Simpson said. “The AG would have to answer to the people for the recommendation that he’s done. The Legislative Council would have to answer to the people when they’re up for a vote for something that they’ve done. You can’t have anyone in government with that type of power that doesn’t have to answer to the people.”
Albritton noted that he worked for the commission, which hired him and could fire him. He said the current system of checks and balances in the ethics law works well, noting that district attorneys and the attorney general decide whether to prosecute cases and approve administrative penalties recommended by the commission.
“All that we do is make a recommendation,” Albritton said. “But if you’ve got one central body that is defining this area and saying this conduct violates use of office for personal gain or it doesn’t, then it standardizes that approach with a group of people who are dedicated only to this.
“This is not just an area that everybody is fluent in. There’s an established approach to this that’s been going on for about 50 years since the commission was formed, a little over 50 years. And if this bill passes, you’ll be losing all that.”
Simpson said Albritton was mischaracterizing his bill and what it would do.
“The argument that the Ethics Commission is trying to make that this is weakening the ethics laws is just not factually correct,” Simpson said. “It’s just different than what they’re used to. They’re concerned about their jobs and I understand that.
“My interest is not protecting someone’s job. My interest is making sure the people have someone who has to answer to the people in their role.”
