Requirements that apply to committees, rather it be expenditure committees, major donors, are all listed and we have a parent page that houses all Filing Requirements and what those triggers are to file. And thats to some extent the gateway to the parent page that is specific for any particular filing. So if youre an independent Committee Click here and then youll be brought up to that page. Absolutely. And i can show you that if you want. Im on the committees paper pae under compliance and if i scroll down, theres treasure, disclaimer, filing schedules, restrictions and all are listed here and usually an order of priority and no numerical order here and 114, the new forms that are applicable to committees, actually 114. 5 wouldnt be here. But let me scroll down. There it is. So the forms that apply to committees are listed here under local respiratories. Requiremen. So above this are the state requirements and then local and everything is listed here and these are filing deadlines that apply to the signature gathering period for ballotmeasuring. So if you scroll down, the preelection statements, expenditure dates and here are the new forms that were added as a result of acao and this authors a brief synopsis, what the trigger is for having to file this and this link here, it goes right into the parent page i was in. Great. And again, this serves as a gateway to actually file the form. This is actually where a filer would initiate that form and ill scroll down, but before i do so, i want to show you at the bottom of each like i mentioned earlier, the bottom of each form, theres a pdf of the form, a preview so if a failer wantfilerwants to see the infor, what information should i be collecting, they can review all of the form fields here and the requirements. But the only way to file is electronically . They wouldnt be able to download this pdf and fill out it by hand. No, we would reject that but we have a water mark that says for rearpreviewing purposes. We made sure to emphasize the fact they must efile or electronically file. This also serves as a gateway to file a form. In this case its 114. 5. If control down, ho scroll downa brief summary as to who can file, somebody can file on your behalf and we have forms that office staff can file on behalf of an officer and so forth and we will include instructions here. This is the entrance to the actual filing. So here is where the filer would enter their name, first and last, and their email address. This is the first thats initiating the form, enter in this section and they would enter the person who would be signing the form. So the person who actually has signature authority. In this case, it would be probably be a treasurer, their name an email address would be here. I want to men to mention, the ir and signer could be the same person. But the person initiating has to enter twice in this case. Actually, i am going to quickly demonstrate, again, the filer experience for you. Im going to be conducting this testest in a test environment because its parsed out to the public portals. So if i were to file in the live site, that information would we dont want that to happen. So the entry point is a bit different for a filer, but i just actually wanted to show you what it would look like for a filer in in situation and ill demo the 3. 209, notification of recusal. The recusal would apply to city officers, be listed in conflict of interest and there are two forms here, the advance written determination and the notification of recusal and again, this offers a summary of the law and the triggers that would information a board member or member of a commission or commissioner of the requirement, the Filing Requirements. This is a analyti link that woue them to that form and they would initiate, similar to the previous version. In this case, however, a commissioner has to file on behalf of themselves. So youll see one section here to a name an email address. Ill go ahead and click to the test site. Im a commissioner, ten days eight i recused myself due to a conflict of interest and im required to notify the commission within 15 days of there recusal and im sending down a file now. I entered my name an email address and so this is an access code and this is verification process thats in place to ensure that the person filing is the person who should be filing. So when i enter any email address, what happens an email notice is sent, so its a security measure in place. Is this unique to the Ethics Commission or for all forms filed . Its in the docusign system. And i know in previous departments ive worked in, it has not been in place. Although, we were using docusign for certain processes. So im going to just copy this verification code and add that here. And i can resume filing. If you dont have an active docusign account, they dont recognize it and i used it for testing purposes. So i have to click this disclaimer, but commissioners more than likely, if you were filing this, you would not have this to check this disclaimer box here but you would see the same screen and click enable to continue. So i will start. And the form fields that are highlighted in red are required fields. Anything not in red are optional and in in case, this will be the original filing. If i were to be filing an amendment right now, then i would have to you would see these fields here in red and they now become required fields because i have to reference the original filing date, the date of the original filing that this is associated with and the reason for the amendment. But in this case, im just going to file an original. And here, in section two, name of member of the board of commission, this is where i would enter my name. And the name of the board of commission, im pickings on the Planning Commission today. Then the work number and work email. And im just going to the recusal information is required in section 3, the date the recusal occurred, ten days eight, so that was august 6th. I believe this is date validated, so youll be want to enter the date as you see here, it gives you a tool kit as to how the date should be entered. If i were to enter this incorrectly, it would tell me to do it again. Agenda item would it give you an error message not within the time frame that you need to in this case its a permit matter. Explain the financial interest costs and the recusal. In this case i would just say that i have a 20 ownership in r. G. Development. And again in this situation, its a onestep process. The member who recuses himself or herself is also the filer and the signer. So that can all be done in one step. Oh, excuse me, one more thing before i get to the signing. Its also required that the agenda be attached. So thats a required field. So you click here, upload a file. Ive actually received todays agenda here and done. So now that it looks like its disabled, that means theres a document attached to the form. I just click here to sign. It will adopt my signature. I can choose another signature if i dont like the style, adopt, sign, and hit finish. That will immediately oh, and i have the option here now to download the signed document. If you were on your home computer, you can actually upload it to a cloud account or save it to your computer as a p. D. F. Theres a lot of options here. Im just going to close. But in addition to that, ive also received via email certification of completion. And if there were two partyies involved in this filing experience, there was the initiator and a signer, both would get certificate of completion at the end of the transaction. Again, if this was in a live environment, that information would be immediately extracted, parsed out to the live data sets and the engagement and Compliance Division would also receive a notification that a form had been filed, specifically form 3209 had been filed. So will the commission or the Department Also get a copy that this form has been filed . No, not the commission. The filing responsibility is on the commissioner who did the recuse recusal. Right. Im thinking would there be some accountability that this person has recused him or herself and they filed this form. So should the Actual Department of the commission be notified . They would be aware of the actual recusal because it occurred that it occurred prior to the filing requirement. The filing requirement is a requirement imposed by the Ethics Commission. So i dont know that that would be something that they would be looking to ensure that its because the responsibility is actually on the commissioner who recused themselves. But there is again, in the public environment, you know, a department could they wouldnt actually receive notice from this process, but if they wanted to check that it happened, they could do that. Or implement another process where the commissioner had to bring a copy. But i think that would be a protocol that would have to be enforced at the commission level, that the commissioner belonged to the Planning Commission in this case. The form 700. We all know we have to file it. Sometimes its nice to have reminders that you need to file. And so and actually, thats a great segue into the i want to show you actually, if a member of the public or if the commissioner who just filed that wanted to see what i just filed is not going to be on what im going to show you now, but show you where that is laid out and how the information is made available to the public. So again, its going to be available in sf r data sf which used to be open data, but they changed the name. So if you have a member of the public that doesnt know that they can navigate from the commissions website that is familiar with sf data, they cannac citizens this from that website. We wanted to make it relatively easy and navigate from the commissions website. Im going to go to disclosures and in this case actually. Conflict of interest doesnt fall under my jurisdiction. Disclosures, i would navigate so we have it kind of itemized here. Campaign finance, city officers, lobbyists, campaign consultants, major developers, so all the disclosures relevant to these parties would be under the corresponding field. In this case it applies to city officers. The notification of recusal. And at the this is again it just yeah, there we go. This again just it highlights the requirements in the law and so forth again on this page. But at the bottom here youll see a dashboard. So lets say that the filing that i just filed, lets say this is live right now . This is live, absolutely. There was one specifically that i saw the other day that i wanted to show. But accessing it from this particular table would actually reveal the p. D. F. Of the filing. I did want to make sure to show you what that looks like in real time. Here we go. This was a file filed on june 24 and its i want to see i just want to show you the form is completed and at the end of it is the attached agenda. And a member of the public could just review it here if they wanted to print it out and so forth, theyre able to do so. I also wanted to show you how the information is parsed out to the to data sf. You can actualliac actually access that information as well. If the Planning Commission take it up in august and they dont decide and hear it again in september, would the commissioner need to file again in september, like an amendment, or is a single filing sufficient to cover that matter no matter how long it takes to be decided . I dont have the answer to that actually. I would assume that it would be each time the recusal took place, but im yeah. Im not id have to do that research and get back to the commission on that. Most likely it would be every meeting. Every meeting, okay. Thank you. So now ive entered data sf and it took accessing it from that page took me right to the recusal notification filings on data sf. So that same filing that i just showed, i just want to quickly show you what it looks like h e here. Here we go. The p. D. F. , but it is available on data sf. I dont believe we actually have dashboards because this really wouldnt work in a dashboard format, this particular filing. But it was a Campaign Finance form that had a contribution associated with it and so forth, it would also be available on the commissions dashboard. That concludes my presentation. Any other questions . Thank you for this. This was very illuminating and a tremendous amount of work clearly has gone into the development of the forms and the workflow and creating a experience that is streamlined and contemporary in feel. I think its utterly fantastic that this data is available not just to the Ethics Commission staff and commissioners, but to the public as well in a searchable and in an easytonavigate format. Thank you for that. Well done. Thank you so much. If i may add a brief comment. Thank you for your comments as well as the commission and public for this ability to present this information today. As i think you can see, theres a lot of information from the law that was enacted. I do want to take a moment to acknowledge the amount of team effort that went into getting us this far. I think everybody on staff who had a hand in this process is excited to seeing rachael present today because of the technology and the thought that went into it. I would acknowledge rachaels contribution. Rachael joined the commission in late february and her responsibility is in the Campaign Finance area. She has taken on a tremendous effort in shepherding this process and a great contribution to getting it this far. Two other things youll see as we go through this, a lot of the questions you might have on your minds today are things we will look to develop further as we do more outreach to departments and other officials so they know how to work these forms and they find it easy. At the bottom of every page rachael showed us, there is a green box that says provide feedback. We will be monitoring that closely so we can get feedback about the realworld users so we can continually improve this process. Thank you for your time because it is exciting to have gotten this far. This is a great presentation, by the way. Great job. I notice that even though the website is in different languages, that some of the materials are not made available in other languages. I would suggest that for the fact sheet be made in different languages because that was very important. The p. D. F. Thats available . The fact sheet that you would be producing. Thats an internal document that we actually dont publish, but we could potentially think about maybe translating the web content and maybe the p. D. F. Version of the form. Or maybe you can make a publicly available fact sheet because theres so much information. If people can just get a onepage fact sheet just to get them aware of whats happening with the new law in different languages, especially in the chinese and spanish language, that would be helpful. Thats a great point and well be sure to have those discussions. Thank you for that. That was a really important point, to make sure that the information and tools are accessible to everyone in the community. Thank you. Thank you. Now well move to agenda item number 12 and 10. Well take those out of order. Im sorry, we need to do im sorry, agenda item number 9, Public Comment. No Public Comment. Agenda item 12, discussion of monthly staff enforcement report, including an update on various programmatic and operational highlights of the enforcement programs activities since the last monthly meeting. Mr. Pierce, id like to ask you as you go through this, just bear in mind the level set all of us in terms of where we are and enforcement activities and use this as a background in framing item to teeup the discussion in agenda item number ten. Sure. Thank you, chair and comirge commissioners. I will also have an opportunity to teeup the discussion around item 10, given some of the statistics weve reported there. But youll see that in this months enforcement report in item 12, weve provided some additional data, given that we made it through the end of the fiscal year and have not had a meeting since we turned over into the new fiscal year, we provided for you at the top of page 2 some of the metrics that we keep track of as a division there. For comparison, weve reported them, both in terms of the fiscal year that just concluded, as well as the prior fiscal year. Some of these metrics youve not seen before. On the monthly enforcement report, we typically report on the number of matters in preliminary review and under investigation, as well as the average number of months that each of those matters might be. Here weve provided a wider snapshot of the things that division has kept track of for the last, i would guess, three years. You can see that comparing the two fiscal years we got twice as many complaints in fiscal year 2018 as we got in 19. I think one two reasons for that. One would be the Mayoral Election of 2018 took place in fiscal year 2018. We actually saw between march and june of 2018, the division received 89 complaints just during that fourmonth window leading up to the election there or leading up to and including the election, which accounted for more than twice the complaints of that fiscal year. For comparison, between august and november of 2018, november 2018 in which we had another election, we got only 41 complaints. So the public and others were substantially invested in the Mayoral Election in june of 2018. A second reason for the distinction in complaint numbers would be something that you may have noticed in item 10, which is a process improvement that the Enforcement Division has adopted, which draws on the distinction that the charter makes between formal and informal complaints, a distinction thats enforcement regulations reinforce, which is to assign to the enforcement director discretion to consider informal complaints. The charter requires that we consider informal complaints, but offers discretion to consider informal complaints. One of the changes to process we have adopted is if on the face of the complaint its immediately obvious to the enforcement director and to investigators that they lack jurisdiction, rather than assigning it to an investigator and turning it through the ordinary preliminary review machinery, i as the enforcement director will consult with the complainant, advise them about the scope of our jurisdiction and if i can direct them to some other entity that might be able to handle their complaint. So you will see in fiscal year 2018 we had 34 complaints for which we lacked jurisdiction. Those we had actually logged. So that 34 is a subset of the 163. In fiscal year 2019, the roughly 30 that we handled through this consultation and no further action process are in addition to the 83. Then a couple of other things to note would be that in each of the fiscal years we dismissed approximately dismissed or referred approximately twothirds of the complaints that we received and opened approximately onethird of those. Then finally, as to resolutions, we had fewer stipulations in fiscal year 2019, but larger penalties overall. But we did also resolve more matters in fiscal year 2019 than we had in fiscal year 2018, 22, as compared to 15. One reason for that is the regulations that this Commission Adopted i think in january of 2018 and which became effective in march of last year provide that the commission can close in the interest of justice an open investigation, meaning that we can decide, irrespective of the evidence, irrespective of potential liability in that matter, that there are overriding reasons why the commission should no longer invest resources in that particular matter. So i think if you look at the numbers there, in fiscal year 2019 we saw a 60 increase in the number of times we utilized that option. The reason is likely that the option came into existence only in the final quarter of fiscal year 18. If you go down to the statistics that we traditionally report in the monthly enforcement report, you can see again that we have an increased number of complaints that are awaiting preliminary review. The time that it takes us to review those complaints is somewhat down from our last reporting in june, but significantly up from our last reporting in july of 2018. One reason for that may be again that these numbers are averages, but considering the number of complaints that would have come in, in june of 2018, the bulk of the those awaiting staffs review at that time were effectively brand new. So that would be one reason, but potentially not all of the reasons theres a distinction in the amount of time it now takes staff to now move through these reports. It may be that we had four investigators at that time as well, but i cant remember with 100 accuracy. And then finally looking at the number of investigations open, weve reported for august that there are a full 95 investigations on this docket for a staff of three investigators. So every investigator has assigned to him roughly 30 investigations. A couple of them remain mine from the time that i was an investigator before i occupied the role as director. Given the commissions unanimous decision today to approve the proposed stipulations, this number will actually shift to 90. Once we close those particular matters, we should expect to see the average age of those investigations come down a couple of those that were on the agenda for today were some of the older ones. But as we turn in a minute to item 10, i would ask you to hold in your minds the size of the investigative docket at 90 or 95 and the amount of time overall that it takes staff, which includes for most matters, not just the investigators but also the executive director the enforcement director and the executive director and in some instances the commission itself, but if you contemplate overall from complaint receipt to resolution, 7 and 16, were looking at nearly two years on average from receipt of a complaint to resolution of a matter, whether thats by stipulation or closure or a determination that the evidence suggests an absence of liability. And then finally i would direct you to the numbers that we report each month in relation to the bureau of delinquent revenues. The collection officer continues to complete her review of delinquent late fees based on her calculations she had managed to sweep up 34,000 in previously unpaid fees at this point since her initial efforts finger since her start in february or march of this year. If you look at the status of matters before the bureau, you will see there are an additional four matters we have referred there on the basis of delinquent filers who did not or could not respond to the fines collection officer. I would note of those four, one of the entities listed there has already negotiated a payment plan with the bureau. The others apparently remain nonresponsive. Finally an update on the Lynette Sweet matter. Youll recall this matter is actually in litigation in superior court, which the city and county brought previously. That litigation was stayed as a result of a federal bankruptcy filing that ms. Sweet made. That bankruptcy filing has been dismissed, as we discussed last time, dismissed but not closed. I dont know whether judge smith could enlighten us on what a federal court means to dismiss a matter without i avoided bankruptcy cases. The superior court judge was interested to hear from the parties in august what the status of that bankruptcy hearing might be. The superior court judge has once again postponed that hearing to february of 2020. I was just over at the tax attorney at the bureau. That tax attorney and i have been in pretty close contact. We have been communicating with ms. Sweet and we have communicated to her that the commission would agree to a settlement of 20,000, which represents the amount of public funds for which she could not account. So effectively 20,000 is the minimum to which we would agree because thats the amount of damages that the city and county suffered as a result of her particular Campaign Finance misconduct, which was a failure to account for how that money was spent. And at my last communication with the tax attorney, ms. Sweet has made a proposal to pay that 20,000 through a payment plan, which would be longer than the commission would allow if this were a settlement negotiated with the executive director. Because it is, instead, a settlement negotiated through litigation with the bureau of delinquent revenue, were happy to allow that because it does not render the commission itself effectively the Lending Agent in this case. Ms. Sweet has agreed to that and i can provide further details at a future meeting, although nothing is yet written down. Well, thats great news because this has been pending for quite a while and it is a significant amount. Its if we can get to 20,000 in a reasonable payment plan, i think thats a terrific outcome. Good luck with that. The question i had is the matters with chris jackson. I think these have been on this report since i joined the Ethics Commission. Is there i think we talked last time about directing either the bureau of delinquent revenues or an alternative to the bureau to try and locate mr. Jackson or to send it to a Collections Agency. Is that something that we could do . Because were coming up now on six years. Actually, we passed the sixyear anniversary of when the referral was made for collection of this amount. I dont know how much the bureau invests in trying to locate him. I dont know if this is a heavy resource constraint in comparison to what they might get out of it. Im happy to follow up with them and even permit them to cut and run here or assign it to a Collections Agency as they did with others. Im happy to do that. And then do we have a payment plan for some and others did not . Obviously the Lynette Sweet is out of our control from a commission standpoint, but i see the Latino Democratic Club is on a payment plan. I thought at one point we were not doing payment plans and now we are. We are talk about this in agenda item number 10 as well, but whats the current play . My own understanding of that is the revisions to the enforcement regulations communicated newly a preference against payment plans. The executive director retains discretion to engage in a payment plan, but she would need to be convinced of the need of that. As the regulations are written, she would agree to a payment plan of not longer than six months. Again, my reading of the regulations is that they apply in instances where the executive director is, herself, negotiating that settlement with the respondent. It comes before the commission before its consideration. This is a different posture in this regard. Its an unpaid late fee. Effectively an unpaid debt that has been reassigned to another agency, whose job it is to collect those debts. So it is not a negotiated settlement directly with the commission, with the executive director. It its possible that the tax attorneys would have been happy to apply the sixmonth limitation, but our view is that that is not necessary because one reason to refer to the bureau is for the city and the county to recover what they can. So if the bureau sees fit to negotiate other approaches, then were happy to permit them to do that. If there are not other questions on item 12, ill turn to item 10. I think we need to take Public Comment on agenda item. Commissioner, did you have a i have a couple of questions or comments on item 10. First of all, i want to complement you on your new procedures sorry, commissioner, i think were going to take comment on 12. Do you want to speak on 12 . [ indiscernible ] did he have two separate violations . Is that what this is about . He did. I think the i. D. Number refers there to well, actually the i. D. Number is a number the bureau assigns to it but not the commission. But the answer is yes, two separate matters. Any other questions from commissioners . Ill call for Public Comment on agenda item number 10. Any Public Comment im sorry, on agenda item number 12. Okay. No Public Comment. Okay. Well now move to agenda item number 10, discussion and possible action on enforcement process improvements review. Thank you, chair and commissioners. So item 10, were pleased to bring this to you today. This has been in development for some time and were glad that each of you could join for this discussion because we covet your feedback, your guidance, your direction on the particular proposals that were bringing for you today. Just as a reminder, item 10 comes before you essentially at the request of chair chu who requested that staff prepare a presentation about information regarding the existing case load and certain proposals that staff might bring about how to prioritize the commissions enforcement resources. So in presenting item 10 to you, id like to highlight just three particular things before we open it up to questions or guidance from the commission, though i would also invite you to interrupt me at any time that you might wish to. But theres three things that i want to highlight include remarks about the existing case load and basically picking up again from item 12, effectively how we got to where we are today. The second thing id like to highlight is the discretionary factors that staff are proposing to adopt that we would apply to the existing docket and to complaints as they come in and welcome your direction as to whether those are the right factors that you think we should be applying; and if so, receive your guidance on how we should go about applying them. The third thing id like to highlight for you is our readiness to engage in a process to revise the fixed penalty policy and, again, to receive any direction that you might have for us to do so. Turning to the first thing that i wish to highlight. In figures 1 and 2, we sought to respond to your request here too that we would provide information about the existing docket. Figure 2 gets more granular than figure 1 and provides some information of the variety in terms of categories that you, chair chu, have suggested previously. In terms of trying as a commission to distinguish between broad categories of matters, and those broad categories that you have suggested previously are administrative and substantive. I think if we examine these categories, we find that even digging in with a little more granularity, it can be hard to know what the type or scope of public harm might be in a particular matter. So if we look there at figure 2, you can see that we had five cases. Again, these numbers are based on the open investigative docket that existed at the time of the may meeting, which is the snapshot we used to produce this analysis. But we had five cases at that time related to contribution limits. And we had 17 which concerned the failure to file certain disclosures or to disclose contributions or expenditures properly. I think one challenge that we find is that although we might contemplate that a violation of the contribution limit is a substantive violation and a violation of the disclosure or recordkeeping requirements constitute an administrative violation, you could imagine that if in one matter somebody inadvertently violates the contribution limit by, say, 100, but in another matter a Committee Fails to account for 80 of its expenditures, you would agree in that comparison the administrative violation creates a greater threat of public harm than the substantive violation. Its because of wrestling with these distinctions that we would like to contemplate discretionary factors, as opposed to a different approach to setting priorities, which might be to assign greater care to certain kinds of violations, as opposed to others. We think that using discretionary framework is the more suitable way to go. Its also the case, just to close that point, that we certainly acknowledge the feedback that weve received from the commission about maybe the disproportionate number of disclaimer settlements that we bring before the commission. One reason for that is those are proceeded through the fixed penalty policy and they require relatively little investigation and far fewer resources than other matters. But we could at the same time envision a disclaimer case which, like the recordkeeping case, creates a greater threat of public harm. Certain disclaimer cases can be, for example, dark money cases. Committees may fail to disclose who their top donors are, or they may fail to disclose the committee is candidate controlled. Or they may fail to disclose that it was a candidate expenditure. Those types of failures to disclose can be one type or another. If you look at a regulation that a Public Commenter how it was handled through the streamlined process, you will see there are particular characteristics that would actually disqualify a disclaimer case from the benefit of the streamlined process. Some of those circumstances include situations that create confusion for the public about who paid for the advertisement and what sort of an advertisement it actually was. We understand that a lot of the interest in advancing this item today, going back again to item 12, turns on the amount of time that it takes for the division to move through im sorry, could we pause for a moment. Id actually like to solicit the input from my fellow commissioners on the point you just made about a discretionary framework, versus a focus on specific types of cases. So what i hear you saying is that providing staff with the discretion to determine which cases because a disclaimer case could really go to the heart and integrity of our Public Financing system, for example, or our election system and that it could rise to the level of something that would be all hands on deck, lets make sure we investigate that. But ill love to hear from my fellow commissioners your thoughts on that because, youre right, over the past in my time on the commission, weve seen a lot of the font size or disclaimer cases and they are easier to dispose of. I just think its important for us to be mindful of our limited resources, finite resources. Again, that 90plus matter case load and how do we best deploy your team against that to have the best results possible and what are our priorities in that context. And is this the right framework for us to be thinking about. I think for my own part the discretionary piece is really important because its not i dont think that its a good outcome for us to say cases of x, y, z type are less important than others because, depending on the fact pattern, they could all be very important and they could all go to the heart of the integrity of our system and trust in the process. But i would really like to hear from my fellow commissioners on that. Because this is kind of a fork in the road, right, if we go down one path versus the other, its hard to do both or. I mean, i confess that i had not given a great deal of thought before you raised this question, but it seems to me any time you start going from a bright line to a discretionary rule, theres always the chance of slippery slopes and different peoples viewpoints making a big difference. At first blush, its hard for me to imagine, for example, the size of the font ever amounting to a huge substantive issue. On the other hand, could it . I dont know. So i dont know. Im not sure if im addressing your question or what it is youre worried about. I have not been troubled so far by what ive seen on the discretionary aspect. Im happy with what discretionary decisions ive seen by the staff certainly on these stipulations and things ive i have not been on the commission very long, but i certainly have not seen any cause to be concerned about any of the stipulations that ive seen so far which has enhanced my respect and ability to rely on the staff at this point, but i do understand the point youre making and think its something we should keep watching. I have a question. On the discretionary aspect, do you guys look at intent . Because just as an example, we went through in preparation for todays meeting, we had five or six stipulations. For me, one stood out more than the rest. The reason it stood out was because, as far as i was concerned, the intent, right. So is that do you guys look at intent when you figure, well, this is discretionary, we can deal with this one rather easily because we review a lot of materials, theres no intent. Whereas in this other case theres clear intent and maybe we should focus on this one a little more in depth, if that makes sense. It does make sense. We certainly do look at intent. I would note that intent is a factual question. So we may not be able to evaluate at the outset that a respondent committed a violation willfully. So if we were to try to utilize intent as a factor to determine that we want to pursue one case instead of another, theres a slight chicken and egg problem. If there were reasons to believe that the violation may have been willful, that we then later had to substantiate, that would be a reason to contemplate it. I would locate intent, for example, among the factor for severity. If a respondent commits a willful violation, it is a more severe violation. It is, in fact, a criminal violation. Any violation committed with intent becomes a misdemeanor, obviously that doesnt fall to us to prosecute. Likely, we could also assign intent to the second discretionary factor which could be the intent of the decision. If it could be found that the respondent behaved willfully, under the existing factors provided in the enforcement regulations, we would seek a higher penalty because intent is an aggravating factor. Presumably, the public has a heightened interest in the commissions bringing to resolution matters for which they behaved intentionally and willfully. I think that raises a very important issue and does in a sense go to the comment i was making. Intent is a factual decision. So if what youre trying to do is cut down on procedural time and make your enforcement more efficient, whatever, adding intent as a major component of it, i think, is going to do exactly the opposite, which is going to slow down your investigations and cause more im not quite sure what the appellate issues then are, but that you would then get into that whole area. I dont know where that line i may provide one clarification, which is that is discretionary factors that we have proposed here regard which of the complaints staff wish to pursue. They say less about how we pursue those complaints. So the object before us now is to decide, okay, given the limited resources that staff have, given the number of complaints that come in or the number of investigations that are already on the docket, should we be making harder decisions at the outset . So how did we get here . One way that we got here was that for at least the last couple of years, our ambition was to lay a foundation in the Enforcement Division. We intended to adopt clear and more reasonable regulations and to implement them in the most practical way. And at the same time we intended to effectively take whatever came in, to work our way through all of the alleged misconduct that we inherited from prior staff, as well as to contemplate whatever came in under our own watch in order to increase fairness, predictability, public trust in the process. But i think what we are discovering today is that although that effort to lay that foundation has fielded certain benefits, it has also come with certain costs. So what were asking ourselves is if we are to depart from a process by which we look at we open all meritorious complaints and we investigation all meritorious complaints in roughly the order we receive them, how would we depart from that process . What is the most sensible way of making hard decisions about which investigations the Commission Wants us to conduct. So talking again about forks in the road. If discretionary factors is a way to do that, another fork would be how do we apply those discretionary factors . There are options. So to be more specific, we could say staff intends to apply these discretionary factors at the outset. We get a complaint. We evaluate the severity, the impact, the probability that will be able to prove it up. And if something falls too far down on the ladder, we dont open it, even though its meritorious. So we have fewer matters on the docket. We could, in addition, look at the existing docket and decide applying these factors, considering the 90 matters that are still open, which of them again fall too far to the bottom of the ladder in terms of the factors that we wish to apply here. Lets clear out some of the chaff and free ourselves up to pursue the ones that we think matter the most. That would be one approach to this, is to whittle down the size of the docket on the basis of these factors. A second approach would be different. The second approach would be to say we will continue to open all meritorious complaints and to place them on the investigative docket. What we will then do is apply the discretionary factors in determining how to assign resources to the complaints that are on the docket. So we would take the 90 that we have right now and we close out any of them. We would, instead, assign resources to the most significant ones on the basis of analysis that staff would make together in office. One of the considerations that i would ask you to make as a commission and directing us between the options available to us, if we take the second approach, we continue to open all meritorious complaints, but we intentionally allow some of those complaints to lie fallow, is that you must anticipate that the average age of investigations on the docket will continue to go up because we are intentionally opening investigations, knowing that we may not investigate them. We are intentionally assigning to the docket matters that may expire under the statute of limitations. One result of that would be that the statistics that we report on a monthly basis would become less meaningful or possibly misleading without a sufficient amount of explanation about why those numbers are changing. I