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248 early reputations during the proceedings. See Robert Kennedy’s 1960 account of the hearings, The Enemy Within.

140. Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959, Pub. L. 86–257, September 14, 1959, 73 Stat. 519 (codified at 29 U.S .C . §401 et seq. (2000)). Section 431(b) in Title 29 of the U.S. Code requires unions to file annual reports and sets forth information requirements. Section 438 of the same title provides for the secretary of labor to “have authority to issue, amend, and rescind rules and regulations prescribing the form and publication of reports required to be filed under this subchapter and such other reasonable rules and regulations (including rules prescribing reports concerning trusts in which a labor organization is interested) as he may find necessary to prevent the circumvention or evasion of such reporting requirements.” The legislation was passed by a vote of 95–2 in the Senate and 352–52 in the House.

141. Concern about the LMRDA violating union officers’ Fifth Amendment rights under the Constitution is discussed in Robb, 1961. A pessimistic view from the time concerning the prospects for improving internal union democracy through government intervention can be found in Petro, 1959.

142. The OLMS had a staff of 286 in fiscal year 1999, including an auditing staff of 5 and a total of 158 investigators. The GAO estimated that OLMS processed 2,435 reporting- and disclosure-related cases in that year, which required it to devote a little under 5 percent of its total time to these activities. See General Accounting Office, 2000, Appendix I, pp. 18–21.

143. If unions (or other parties required to file under LMRDA) willfully fail to file reports, knowingly make false statements or withhold information, or conceal or destroy materials, they face fines of up to a hundred thousand dollars and up to one year in prison. See Employment Standards Administration, Office of Labor-Management Standards, Reports Required Under the LMRDA and the CSRA (Washington, D.C .: U.S. Department of Labor, 2001).

144. The LMRDA requires each level of the union with governance responsibility to provide separate disclosure under the act, providing information regarding financial activity (revenues and expenses) only at that level of the union. This makes it a complicated matter for a user trying to examine reports of a local for information regarding related expenditures or revenues at regional and national levels.

145. See General Accounting Office, 2000, for a discussion of these costs.

146. For example, many union locals receive representation and administrative support from staff paid for by the international office of their union. These expenditures (the salaries of these individuals as well as associated expenses) show up in the accounts of the international, rather than local, union. Unions also deal with the flow of dues revenues to the various levels of the union in different ways. For example, in many unions, dues are paid to the local union, which then remits a portion of them to intermediate and national levels of the organization on the basis of per capita fees set out in union constitutions. Although the disclosure forms under the law allow one to analyze these flows, it requires significant understanding of union structures and accounting practices.

147. For critiques along these lines, see Masters, 1997.