Very often, political parties and/or candidates are required to report their income and/or expenditure to the Electoral Management Body or other authority, or to have their accounts audited by the electoral authorities. [1] If this is the case, the accounts are then often disclosed to the public after auditing. In reporting and disclosure regulations, there is a need to strike a balance between the wish by outsiders to know (transparency) and the wish by donors and recipients to maintain their private sphere (privacy). There is a bigger need to respect privacy in countries where the risk of harassment against donors to specific parties is greater. In societies with a low level of public trust in political parties, there is usually a higher demand for transparency and consequently more public disclosure of finances.

Reporting and public disclosure can serve many purposes ranging from assisting the election authorities to ensure that money is not accepted from illegal sources; to being an empowerment of voters in deciding which party or candidate they want to vote for. The main dividing line in reporting and disclosure regulations is whether or not the information gathered is made available to the public.

In cases where the information is made public, it is often argued that voters have the right to know where the political parties and candidates got their money from, to be able to make an informed choice on Election Day. If the reporting information is made available to the public it can:

• Help expose corruption

If a political party or candidate has received large amounts of money from an individual or a company, and is later seen to initiate or vote for decisions that would directly benefit the donor, public disclosure gives media and private citizens a better chance to question the grounds for the decision.

• Give taxpayers information about what public funds have been used for

In cases where political parties and candidate campaigns are wholly or partly financed by public means, disclosure gives taxpayers information about what the money has been used for.

• Serve as an alternative or complement to prohibitions and ceilings

Laws and regulations prohibiting certain sources of funds or expenditure items – and laws on ceilings and limits on how much a party or candidate can raise and/or spend – can be difficult and costly, or even impossible, to enforce. Public disclosure can either be an alternative to these laws or serve as a complement. By making the sources and expenditure known to the general public, voters can clearly indicate what they think is acceptable by not voting for parties and candidates who have received their funds from dubious sources.

There are four primary principles underpinning successful regulation on public disclosure. The information provided to the public needs to be: [2]

Accurate, which means that the enforcement agencies need to have the means to audit the reports and ensure that they give a correct picture of the finances of the party or candidate’s campaign. 

• Timely, in the sense that information on election expenditure published long after the elections can neither affect the voters’ choice on election day, nor serve as a good basis for reasonable sanctions.
• Include the right amount of detail, and not overburden the reader with a level of detail that is not useful. If the reports are to be read by an informed public, they need to be presented in a way and with a level of detail to make them understandable to a non-professional.
• Publicly available, not only on public display in a government office in the capital during office hours, but rather published in a way that gives the maximum number of citizens the chance to read the reports. Depending on the country, this may mean publication in main newspapers or on the website of the enforcement agency (EMB or other) or even posting summaries on public notice boards.