Flights to the mainland, hotel rooms, thousands of dollars worth of meals, rental cars and Uber and Lyft rides are among the hundreds of expenses that state Rep. Kaniela Ing failed to report on his campaign spending reports over the years, according to updated reports he filed over the weekend with the Hawaii Campaign Spending Commission.
Ing was fined more than $15,000 by the commission in June for filing 23 false reports detailing his campaign contributions and expenditures and for other violations of campaign spending laws. He was ordered to file updated and accurate reports by Oct. 27.
Campaign spending reports, which must be filed throughout the year, are published on the commission’s website to ensure transparency and public access to information about who is donating to candidates and how they are spending those funds. Because Ing’s filings were plagued with errors and omissions, the public lacked that information through much of his time in office. Staff found that in total, Ing only reported about 38 percent of expenditures made from 2011-2016.
Ing provided some of that information in updated filings in April, but much of it remained missing until this week’s filings.
Almost all of the reports that Ing filed between 2011 to 2016 were wrong. Errors continued even after Ing was under investigation by commission staff, updated filings show.
For example, his original reports covering 2017 didn’t disclose that his campaign spent $347.56 at the Residence Inn by Marriott to host an unnamed “visiting supporter,” paid a $143.93 tab at Cafe Julia in downtown Honolulu, and spent more than $500 on rental cars and Lyft rides.
Ing would announce that year that he would not be seeking reelection to the state House of Representatives in order to run for
Congress, a race he lost in this year’s primary. His current term as a state representative is set to expire after the general election.
It’s illegal to use campaign contributions for personal expenses, and Ing has maintained that all of the expenditures were campaign related, except for two
expenses he had already been fined for by the commission. In June, the commission fined him for using campaign funds to cover $2,125 in rent payments for personal residences on Oahu and Maui, and another $219 to make a payment on the credit card of his domestic partner, Khara Jabola-Carolus. Ing subsequently reimbursed his campaign for those payments.
Except for those two expenses, the investigation by staff of the Campaign Spending Commission did not focus on whether Ing’s expenditures were campaign related or personal.
“I think because we got the bank statements and they didn’t match up, that the 23 counts of false reports — I think we felt that, OK, this is enough to get his attention,” said Gary Kam, the commission’s general counsel.
The new filings show that Ing’s campaign spent about $600 on two airline tickets with Virgin America and United Airlines in December 2016. The report doesn’t provide any detail on who the tickets were for, their purpose or the destination. The tickets weren’t reported in Ing’s original January 2017 filings or his updated report in April that was supposed to have corrected any errors. Ing did not respond to requests for comment on this story, including specific questions about how those expenditures and others were campaign related.
Ing didn’t report $675.84 that was spent at Hotel Wailea in Sept. 2016, which he lists as a “mahalo party.” He also didn’t disclose in original reports a $482 payment to Airbnb and a $241.60 payment to Washington Court, a hotel in Washington D.C., that were made in July 2015.
Updated filings also show that Ing failed to report dozens of meals totaling about $3,000, including numerous trips to McDonalds, Subway and Starbucks and a $556 tab at RumFire in Waikiki in August 2015 that’s listed as a “volunteer and staff kickoff event.”
Those are just a sampling of the errors that are pervasive throughout Ing’s earlier filings. He also didn’t report thousands of dollars in payments for cell phone service, office supplies and printing and postage for campaign materials.
Ing told the commission earlier this year that the errors in his filings were inadvertent and attributable to his youth and inexperience running a campaign, as well as problems with expiring post office boxes, banking errors and over-drafted accounts. Ing was elected to office in 2012 at the age of 23.
“My mistakes ultimately hurt me and did not result in either long or short-term political, financial, or personal gain,” he wrote in a letter to the commission earlier this year.
Seen as an up-and-coming progressive politician, Ing attracted national attention during his congressional bid this year, even bringing in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to campaign for him. But his campaign spending violations dogged him throughout the race. He finished with only 6 percent of the vote in the seven-way Democratic primary. Ed Case won with 39 percent of the vote.
The updated filings may not be the end to Ing’s troubles with the Campaign Spending Commission. Staff of the commission have not had time to review the filings, but Kam said there already appear to be errors related to the negative cash balance Ing reported in more recent filings. Staff subpoenaed a portion of Ing’s bank records as part of their investigation.
“The next step is definitely going to be to look at his amendments carefully and compare them with the bank statements. Then if we find that the reports are still not true, correct and accurate, which all reports have to be, then we are going to have to discuss what the next steps are,” said Kam. That includes the possibility of referring the case to the state Attorney General in order to obtain a court order compelling Ing to comply with the commission’s order.
“We really got to get eyes on the reports,” said Kam.
