Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act

Mr. President, I am pleased to introduce today the ``Call Center Consumer's Right to Know Act.'' This legislation is in response to the mounting evidence showing that U.S. corporations are rapidly shifting hundreds of thousands high-tech and service sector jobs abroad. Labor officials, business leaders, economists, elected officials and ordinary Americans are concerned that this bleeding

of American jobs will further slow our economy. In addition to the more than 2 million manufacturing jobs that have been lost since 2000, some have indicated that we may also be witnessing the largest out-sourcing of non-manufacturing jobs in the history of the U.S. economy. The statistics are staggering. In the month of July 2003 alone, between 25,000 and 30,000 jobs were outsourced to India. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, roughly one in ten jobs held by Americans in 2001 are now at risk to be outsourced abroad.

These jobs are not specific to one sector or a select few companies, but span a broad array of services, including customer call service centers, payroll and other back-office related activities, stock market research for financial firms, medical transcription services, legal online database research and data analysis for consulting firms. In addition, firms involved with software services and business process outsourcing are rapidly expanding to a host of different countries, including India, the Philippines, Malaysia, China, Russia, Israel, and Ireland.

In addition to rapid service sector job losses, consumers are concerned with the growing threat of identity theft. So far, efforts to stem this tide and keep up with the technological advancements that enable these crimes have done little to allay concerns. This trend becomes all the more alarming when millions of calls involving personal financial transactions are routed beyond our borders, where they are not protected by our laws and law enforcement. Aside from the very serious concerns related to identify theft, there is also a consumer awareness element of this problem, as very few Americans are aware that the person on the other end of the telephone line is in another country. Americans should have full information about the outsourcing of call center jobs when they decide who they will purchase their products and services from.

The ``Call Center Consumer's Right to Know Act'' is a simple and straightforward answer to the challenges posed by these unprecedented service sector job losses and growing risks of identity theft. The bill simply requires call center representatives to disclose their physical location at the beginning of each phone call. Consumers will therefore have important information about who is providing the services in question and the level of risk involved in proceeding with their transaction by phone. This legislation will help American consumers make informed choices about who is providing the services they purchase, and at the same time, addresses the growing problem of U.S. corporations moving hundreds of thousands of service sector jobs abroad. Furthermore, my bill will go a long way to restoring consumer confidence in the booming call center market and help provide a measure of security for telephone and Internet consumer transactions.

There can be no doubt that the outsourcing of these important American service sector jobs abroad has played a part in the jobless, or what some call the ``job-loss'' economic recovery of 2003. It is predicted that future outsourcing of service sector jobs may provide more costly to the US. economy than the loss of American manufacturing jobs we are witnessing today. Unfortunately, the economics that produced this trend are unlikely to change without a concerted effort to both provide companies with an incentive to keep their jobs in American and promote consumer awareness of the services they unknowingly purchase from other countries. This is precisely what the Call Center Consumer's Right to Know Act seeks to accomplish.

I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I am proud to join Senator Russ Feingold as a co-sponsor of legislation that will require Senate candidates to file campaign finance reports in electronic form. This bill will finally remove the exemption the Senate has given itself from an important requirement of campaign finance disclosure laws that apply to everyone else, including candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives and Political Action Committees, PACs.

Political committees active in federal elections must submit their quarterly financial reports for disclosure by the Federal Election Commission, FEC. Anyone interested can nearly instantaneously download the reports from the FEC website and conduct computer searches to learn about the contributions and expenditures of individual candidates for the House, non-Senate national party committees and PACs. The current problem is that they cannot do the same for Senate candidates and parties because of the Senate's insistence on paper rather than electronic filing. The FEC must do more processing of Senate paper reports than of House electronic ones. This involves printing or copying the Senate reports, up to 10,000 pages a day at times, hand- coding transactions that cannot be automatically processed, and keypunching the data into the electronic database. House electronic reports do not need the same treatment. The end result is that in contrast to the House, information from the Senate paper reports are often available well after the election has occurred.

Due to this problem, voters are not well-informed about the campaign finance information of their Senators and Senate candidates. For voters who want to consider the nature of the campaign finance support received by a Senate candidate and its relationship to Senate legislative votes as a factor in deciding for whom they will cast a vote, they clearly cannot.

To address this problem, our legislation requires Senate candidates to file their campaign finance reports electronically with the Secretary of the Senate. Within 24 hours of receipt of those reports, the Secretary is required to forward those reports to the FEC. The FEC, in turn is required to make those reports available on the Internet within 24 hours as they do other reports. Therefore, electronic versions of Senate reports will be available to the public within 48 hours of their filing.

Electronic reports are not only transmitted instantly but are more accurate than paper submissions because software can easily correct mistakes. On the other hand, hand entering of data is always prone to error. Furthermore, the data in electronic reports can be rapidly searched via the Internet for answers to specific questions. Voters will no longer have to go through the time consuming process of reading pages and pages filed by Senate candidates or Senate party committees to figure out the major donors and their employers, and the major recipients of campaign spending. Instead, they can download a filed report from the FEC website onto their personal computers and quickly locate the information they need. This creates effective public disclosure.

The Senate's current failure to provide its constituents with electronically disclosed, timely information is unconscionable. Senate filings should follow the same criteria as other campaign finance reports. There must not be a separate standard for the Senate. Ironically, while they do not currently file electronically, Senators and Senate candidates already use electronic software in compiling their paper reports. If Senators and Senate candidates can use technology to run their offices and websites, why can't they use it to better inform their own constituents about how their campaigns are funded? Their constituents have earned a right to that information. The public interest will be better served and voters' faith in their elected leaders will be restored.

Mr. President, I am proud to join Senator Russ Feingold as a co-sponsor of legislation that will require Senate candidates to file campaign finance reports in electronic form. This bill will finally remove the exemption the Senate has given itself from an important requirement of campaign finance disclosure laws that apply to everyone else, including candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives and Political Action Committees, PACs.

Political committees active in federal elections must submit their quarterly financial reports for disclosure by the Federal Election Commission, FEC. Anyone interested can nearly instantaneously download the reports from the FEC website and conduct computer searches to learn about the contributions and expenditures of individual candidates for the House, non-Senate national party committees and PACs. The current problem is that they cannot do the same for Senate candidates and parties because of the Senate's insistence on paper rather than electronic filing. The FEC must do more processing of Senate paper reports than of House electronic ones. This involves printing or copying the Senate reports, up to 10,000 pages a day at times, hand- coding transactions that cannot be automatically processed, and keypunching the data into the electronic database. House electronic reports do not need the same treatment. The end result is that in contrast to the House, information from the Senate paper reports are often available well after the election has occurred.

Due to this problem, voters are not well-informed about the campaign finance information of their Senators and Senate candidates. For voters who want to consider the nature of the campaign finance support received by a Senate candidate and its relationship to Senate legislative votes as a factor in deciding for whom they will cast a vote, they clearly cannot.

To address this problem, our legislation requires Senate candidates to file their campaign finance reports electronically with the Secretary of the Senate. Within 24 hours of receipt of those reports, the Secretary is required to forward those reports to the FEC. The FEC, in turn is required to make those reports available on the Internet within 24 hours as they do other reports. Therefore, electronic versions of Senate reports will be available to the public within 48 hours of their filing.

Electronic reports are not only transmitted instantly but are more accurate than paper submissions because software can easily correct mistakes. On the other hand, hand entering of data is always prone to error. Furthermore, the data in electronic reports can be rapidly searched via the Internet for answers to specific questions. Voters will no longer have to go through the time consuming process of reading pages and pages filed by Senate candidates or Senate party committees to figure out the major donors and their employers, and the major recipients of campaign spending. Instead, they can download a filed report from the FEC website onto their personal computers and quickly locate the information they need. This creates effective public disclosure.

The Senate's current failure to provide its constituents with electronically disclosed, timely information is unconscionable. Senate filings should follow the same criteria as other campaign finance reports. There must not be a separate standard for the Senate. Ironically, while they do not currently file electronically, Senators and Senate candidates already use electronic software in compiling their paper reports. If Senators and Senate candidates can use technology to run their offices and websites, why can't they use it to better inform their own constituents about how their campaigns are funded? Their constituents have earned a right to that information. The public interest will be better served and voters' faith in their elected leaders will be restored.

Mr. President, today I will introduce with the Senator from Arizona, Mr. McCain, a bill to bring Senate campaigns into the 21st century by requiring that Senate candidates file their campaign finance disclosure reports electronically and that those reports be promptly made available to the public. This step is long overdue, and I hope the Senate will act quickly on this legislation.

A recent report by the Campaign Finance Institute highlighted the anomaly in the election laws that makes it nearly impossible for the public to get access to Senate campaign finance reports while most other reports are available on the Internet within 24 hours of their filing with the Federal Election Commission (FEC). The Campaign Finance Institute report opened with a rhetorical question: ``What makes the Senate so special that it exempts itself from a key requirement of campaign finance disclosure that applies to everyone else, including candidates for the House of Representatives and Political Action Committees?''

The answer, of course, is nothing. The United States Senate is special in many ways. I am proud to serve here. But there is no justification for not making our campaign finance information as readily accessible to the public as the information filed by House candidates or others.

My bill amends the section of the election laws dealing with electronic filing to require reports filed with the Secretary of the Senate to be filed electronically and forwarded to the FEC within 24 hours. The FEC is required to make available on the Internet within 24 hours any filing it receives electronically. So if this bill is enacted, electronic versions of Senate reports should be available to the public within 48 hours of their filing. That will be a vast improvement over the current situation, which, according to CFI, requires journalists and interested members of the public to review computer images of paper-filed copies of reports, and involves a completely wasteful expenditure of hundreds of thousands of dollars to re-enter information into databases that almost every campaign has available in electronic format.

The current filing system also means that the detailed coding that the FEC does, which allows for more sophisticated searches and analysis, is completed over a week later for Senate reports than for House reports. This means that the final disclosure reports covering the first 2 weeks of October are not susceptible to detailed scrutiny before the election.

It is time for the Senate to relinquish its Luddite attitude toward campaign finance disclosure. I urge the enactment of this simple bill that will make our reports subject to the same prompt, public scrutiny as those filed by PACs and candidates for the other body.

I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, today I will introduce with the Senator from Arizona, Mr. McCain, a bill to bring Senate campaigns into the 21st century by requiring that Senate candidates file their campaign finance disclosure reports electronically and that those reports be promptly made available to the public. This step is long overdue, and I hope the Senate will act quickly on this legislation.

A recent report by the Campaign Finance Institute highlighted the anomaly in the election laws that makes it nearly impossible for the public to get access to Senate campaign finance reports while most other reports are available on the Internet within 24 hours of their filing with the Federal Election Commission (FEC). The Campaign Finance Institute report opened with a rhetorical question: ``What makes the Senate so special that it exempts itself from a key requirement of campaign finance disclosure that applies to everyone else, including candidates for the House of Representatives and Political Action Committees?''

The answer, of course, is nothing. The United States Senate is special in many ways. I am proud to serve here. But there is no justification for not making our campaign finance information as readily accessible to the public as the information filed by House candidates or others.

My bill amends the section of the election laws dealing with electronic filing to require reports filed with the Secretary of the Senate to be filed electronically and forwarded to the FEC within 24 hours. The FEC is required to make available on the Internet within 24 hours any filing it receives electronically. So if this bill is enacted, electronic versions of Senate reports should be available to the public within 48 hours of their filing. That will be a vast improvement over the current situation, which, according to CFI, requires journalists and interested members of the public to review computer images of paper-filed copies of reports, and involves a completely wasteful expenditure of hundreds of thousands of dollars to re-enter information into databases that almost every campaign has available in electronic format.

The current filing system also means that the detailed coding that the FEC does, which allows for more sophisticated searches and analysis, is completed over a week later for Senate reports than for House reports. This means that the final disclosure reports covering the first 2 weeks of October are not susceptible to detailed scrutiny before the election.

It is time for the Senate to relinquish its Luddite attitude toward campaign finance disclosure. I urge the enactment of this simple bill that will make our reports subject to the same prompt, public scrutiny as those filed by PACs and candidates for the other body.

I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.