Government Affairs Compliance Reviews

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A thoughtful government affairs compliance review can help spot and correct vulnerabilities before they generate headlines, enforcement actions, or both. Covington regularly conducts these reviews for major corporate clients and associations and provide training to lobbyists, PAC managers, and other key staff. We advise on the full scope of political activity compliance issues, including campaign finance, lobbying disclosure, gifts and ethics, and pay-to-play rules, among other issues, helping clients to identify and remedy problems before they become baked into the organizational culture and before they result in major reputational harm.

Our Election & Political Law group has extensive experience conducting government affairs compliance reviews that are structured to fit our clients’ needs. The reviews involve gathering documents and conducting targeted interviews in a way that provides a thorough review of a company’s government affairs activities while not interfering with day-to-day activities.

Our past reviews have ranged from comprehensive analyses of entire government affairs departments to targeted reviews of PACs or lobbyists’ activities. We present our results in a format that is best suited to our clients’ goals, but often involve presentations to the Board or government affairs leadership, written compliance reviews, and summary charts outlining key areas of concern or improvement.

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Past as Prologue: The Wave of Investigations to Follow the Pandemic Recovery and Actions that Companies Can Take Now to Prepare

On March 30, 2020, the inspectors general of several major agencies selected the Department of Defense Inspector General, Glenn Fine, to lead a newly created federal oversight entity that will investigate waste, fraud, and abuse in connection with the massive new coronavirus economic relief legislation. The inspectors general were exercising new authority ...

Interacting with the Government During the Pandemic: Compliance Blind Spots for Corporations and Executives

The consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic are reverberating in every sector of the global economy, from life sciences to transportation, retail to manufacturing, financial services to sports and entertainment. As federal, state, and local governments attempt to blunt the pandemic’s public health and economic effects, many companies are frantically working with ...

Requesting Congressional Outreach: Key Compliance Considerations

Assistance from congressional offices can be invaluable to an organization with interests before executive branch agencies. But it also can pose legal and optics risks to both the organization requesting the assistance and the congressional office and Member of Congress doing the outreach. A number of high-profile scandals, including the Keating Five matter in ...

Foreign Lobbying Overhauls Stall as Manafort Trials Approach

Robert Kelner is quoted in Roll Call regarding legislation to overhaul the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Mr. Kelner says, “They [lawmakers] are all are focused on ‘toughening’ the statute, which is a political approach, but not an approach that will make it more effective. FARA has been in need of a major overhaul for decades. It’s an extremely vague statute, ...

Covington Publishes Detailed Guide To The Revolving Door Rules

The scenario is all too common: After months of searching for the right candidate and weeks negotiating duties and compensation, a company finally hires a new employee to a position that will entail work on certain government policy issues. The employee seems to be a perfect fit, but after a few days on the job,...… Continue Reading The post Covington Publishes ...

Revisions to the Department of Defense “Revolving Door” Rules

Buried in the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is an obscure, and quite significant, change to the post-employment restriction on U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) civilian and uniformed personnel. This new provision could have a substantial impact on defense contractors and others who recruit DoD personnel to work on policy and procurement matters ...

Virginia Makes Key Adjustments to Law Governing Gifts to Officials, Adds New Lobbyist Gift Notification

Organizations represented by lobbyists in Virginia should be aware of a new law enacted today. The law eliminates a controversial exception to the state’s $100 limit on lobbyist gifts to legislators and officials, adds a key new exception to that law, and also includes an additional gift notification requirement for lobbyists. The changes represent ...

Covington Publishes Comprehensive Advisory Comparing Trump and Obama Executive Orders on Ethics

President Donald Trump this weekend signed his promised “drain the swamp” Executive Order, which imposes ethics restrictions on incoming and outgoing Trump Administration appointees. Incoming appointees would, of course, do well to carefully review the provisions of the Executive Order. But companies that deal with the Administration—whether by lobbying the ...

Trump Administration Executive Order on Ethics Breaks New Ground

President Trump signed an executive order on ethics this weekend that is similar in key respects to the Obama Administration’s executive order governing ethical conduct by presidential appointees. But in one key respect it is significantly broader in scope than the previous Obama executive order. The Trump executive order incorporates the concept of “lobbying ...

New Executive Order on Ethics in Missouri Includes Lobbyist Gift Ban, Revolving-Door Provision; Legislature Considering Additional Restrictions

Earlier this month, newly-installed Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens issued Executive Order 2, applying strict ethics rules to executive branch employees in that state. The order includes a ban on gifts from lobbyists, conflicts of interest rules, and a “revolving door” provision that prohibits employees who leave Greitens’ office from later lobbying his ...

New Executive Branch Ethics Rules on Gifts and Procedures for New Hires, Appointees, and the Presidential Transition

The start of 2017 brings two changes to the federal Office of Government Ethics (“OGE”) rules for executive branch officers and employees. First, important changes to the executive branch gift rules went into effect this week. We detailed those changes in this alert. Second, OGE’s overhaul of the Executive Branch Ethics Program regulations (5 C.F.R....… ...