Four trillion smartphone pings revealed that 40% of corporations visiting the IRS during tax audits never disclosed their lobbying activity.
Smartphone location data shows a massive gap between legal disclosure requirements and actual corporate behavior. Firms frequently send representatives to meet with tax authorities under the radar to influence the outcome of audit campaigns. This shadow lobbying bypasses the transparency laws designed to track political influence. High-frequency movement data provides a level of oversight that traditional reporting methods miss. The public record captures only a fraction of the pressure large companies apply to government agencies.
Shadow Lobbying During Tax Audits
SSRN · 6695900
Data from the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 (LDA) suggest corporate lobbying is modest, identifying fewer than 10% of public corporations as having lobbied the government in the past thirty years. Anecdotes from watchdogs instead suggest significant corporate lobbying occurs without disclosure because of limitations in the LDA (commonly referred to as shadow lobbying). Shadow lobbying is poorly understood because it is difficult to observe. In this paper, I examine corporate lobbying in the se