TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – Florida Gov. Rick Scott has a net worth of $147 million. We know, because Scott is one of 38,000 public officials required to disclose how much money they made in the previous year, what they own and what it's worth.
Hundreds of public officials across Florida are about to be fined twenty-five dollars a day because they have failed to file required financial disclosure information. The information was due July first, and a grace period to file the financial snapshot for almost a thousand people who have yet to file ends Monday night.
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Monday began with 987 people who had yet to file, 67 were constitutional officers, another 230 were from state boards and just over 700 local officials had yet to disclose their finances.
Last week, the entire ethics commission staff spent a day calling the 1,300 who were still late.
"We would much rather get people to file than to fine them at the end, collect those fines, or even prosecute them for failing to file," Florida Commission on Ethics executive director Virlindia Doss said.
The filing requirements have been in place since the late 1970s. There were eight elected legislators who had not filed by Monday morning, including State Rep. Reggie Fullwood, D-Jacksonville, who had not filed as of 4 p.m. and was also the man who was disqualified from running last election, and was forced into a special election to re-earn his seat, after failing to register the proper paperwork on time.
But it's not just public officials who have to file, it's also people who have the authority to spend more than twenty thousand dollars of taxpayer money, and that disclosure is one of the main ways to know if someone is profiting from their service.
"You have somebody on the zoning board and they disclose they own a particular piece of property at a certain location, and you might say, aha..no wonder they are taking this position toward this rezoning change that's right down the road from their property," General Counsel and Deputy Executive Director for the Commission on Ethics, said.
Those who don't file by the end of the day Monday face a $25 a day fine starting Tuesday morning which is capped at $1,500 and takes 60 days to accumulate.