In The Know

Most committees are probably well versed on the standard filing forms Form 3 or 3X.  There is, however, a different form for committees to disclose independent expenditures. Form 5 isn’t used often, but knowing how to fill it out correctly can save you a lot of time.

Form 5 is used to disclose the quarterly reports of independent expenditures (IE), or to file a 24- or 48- hour notice of an IE. A 48-hour notice is required anytime a committee spends $10,000 or more on a specific election during a calendar year. If the date of the IE is within 20 days of a specific election then the committee must file a 24-hour notice once the committee spends $1,000 or more.

Form 5 starts out pretty standard. The form is split in two parts. Schedule 5-A asks you to itemize receipts that were expressly given to the committee for the purpose of running an IE. This is not an itemization of all your committee’s receipts, simply those that were donated just for independent expenditures. Schedule 5-E is the itemization of all the disbursement to vendors for the purpose of running an independent expenditure. 

The difference with Form 5 is at the bottom of each transaction. For each vendor transaction on Schedule 5-E, you will have to list the name of the federal candidate supported or opposed by the expenditure, and check whether the disbursement was intended to support or oppose the candidate. Another part that must be filled out for each transaction is the office being sought by the candidate and what cycle (Primary, General or other) the disbursement occurred in. 

The reason that filling out the Office Sought and Cycle Period fields is so important is that Form 5 calculates aggregation differently than almost all other FEC forms. Most FEC forms fill out an aggregation field with the amount paid to a specific vendor during a cycle. Form 5 calculates the aggregation field by the election in which the independent expenditure occurred. That means that all of the transactions that make up any independent expenditures for say the Ohio Senate Primary 2010 should be added together, and have a different aggregation total than the Ohio Senate General 2010. That is why Form 5 has the aggregation field called “Calendar Year-To-Date per Election for Office Sought”. It is important to know that currently the software provided by the FEC, FECFile, does not correctly calculate these fields. The FEC is aware of this problem, and suggests that until a patch is released, committees file a memo entry with any report stating the correct aggregation totals. Recently, Aristotle launched their own version of Form 5 through our 360 software that does calculate the aggregation fields correctly and is fully compliant with FEC standards. 

If anyone has any questions about Form 5 or other independent expenditure questions feel free to give me a call anytime at 202-543-8345 ext. 229.

John Mannion
Outsourcing Manager

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 at 8:02 am and is filed under Compliance, FEC, PAC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.