There is, at least so far, no proof that Illinois Auditor General Frank Mautino has broken any laws.

But the more one looks at Mautino’s campaign disclosure reports filed while he was a state representative, the more it becomes apparent that the man who has become the state’s top auditor did not always keep his i’s dotted and t’s crossed during 24 years in the General Assembly.

The biggest questions now facing the auditor general concern money spent at Happy’s Super Service, a Spring Valley gas station that received more than $210,000 in Mautino campaign funds in less than 11 years, according to reports filed over the years with the Illinois State Board of Elections (“Questionable campaign spending,” Jan. 22, 2016). The money paid for both gasoline and vehicle repairs, according to files at the elections board, with dozens of payments coming in round figures.

As of press time, Mautino had not responded to inquiries about his campaign spending, although political blogger Rich Miller says that the auditor general told him last weekend that money spent at Happy’s went to repair and fuel several cars, including ones owned by campaign workers. Under state law, campaign funds can be used on vehicles so long as the vehicle in question is used “primarily” for campaign or government work. The law does not define the word “primarily.”

Save for his reported conversation with Miller, Mautino has kept mum, although he has retained public relations consultant Ryan Keith to act as his spokesman in handling questions about campaign spending. In a statement emailed on Tuesday, Keith said little other than that Mautino has “fully disclosed and reported all spending by the campaign” and that “reports fully detail campaign expenditures that were made to help defray the standard, reasonable expenses incurred while Frank performed the governmental and public service duties of serving as state representative of his large, mostly rural district.”

The latter statement suggests that Mautino had a lot of ground to cover while in the General Assembly and so large bills for gas and vehicle repairs shouldn’t be surprising. Keith in his email to the media said that he is “continuing to work through questions and will share more as we can.” During a brief phone call, he declined to answer any specific questions. And there remain several.

For example, Mautino’s campaign reported giving tens of thousands of dollars to Spring Valley City Bank for such non-banking expenses as parking, poll watchers, meetings, travel, “community relations” and costs associated with his annual golf fundraiser (“Money for nothing,” Jan. 26, 2016). Officials with Spring Valley City Bank did not return a phone call. Tom Newman, director of the division of campaign disclosure at the Illinois State Board of Elections, said that he can’t explain why a bank would receive money for such things.

“To me, it sounds like a situation of a (campaign) committee that doesn’t quite know how to report these things,” Newman said. “There may be some sloppy reporting going on.”

There are other apparent boo-boos in campaign disclosure reports from Mautino, who is now charged with ensuring that public money is properly spent. For example, he often reported money given by companies with no registered political committees as “transfers in,” a category of giving that is supposed to be reserved for political committees, as opposed to individuals and entities without political committees whose donations are supposed to be recorded as “individual contributions.” Such miscategorization is often a case of no-harm-no-foul, according to the elections board, which in written guidelines tells candidates that disclosure, even if imprecise, is the primary goal.

“(T)he concern is for disclosure,” the board writes in “A Guide To Campaign Disclosure.” “In other words, although reporting a contribution in the correct part is important, it is more important to actually report the contribution than to put it in the correct category.”

There is also the matter of an outing at the Sangamo Club last spring. Or was it two outings? It’s hard to say from Mautino’s campaign reports, which show that the Trustmark Insurance Company’s political action committee paid $95.87 for food and beverages on April 29, 2015, which was reported as an in-kind contribution. Five days later, the CIGNA political action committee paid an identical amount for food and beverages at the Sangamo Club. The total of $191.74 paid by the two committees was matched to the penny in non-itemized in-kind contributions memorialized on the same report, which doesn’t say what was included in those non-itemized contributions, who made them or when.

Newman theorizes that the two committees split the Sangamo Club tab, but he can’t be certain. Only Mautino can say for sure.

Contact Bruce Rushton at [email protected].