Colorado’s Judicial Department last week offered two days of training to its more than 350 judges statewide on how to file personal financial disclosure reports, as well as asked the attorney general whether senior judges must also file the public documents just weeks after The Denver Gazette stories disclosed dozens had not.
The training and stern reminder of an annual Jan. 10 deadline for filing comes three months after a Denver Gazette review found that one in six judges — even more when senior judges were added — had not filed the required disclosures last year.
It is a misdemeanor for a judge to knowingly not file the disclosure. The Colorado Commission on Judicial Discipline immediately launched its own inquiry into the newspaper’s findings.
The Denver Gazette also found that nearly two dozen judges, some of them chiefs of their judicial district, hadn’t filed the reports — a requirement by law, for several years. Some hadn’t filed at all since taking to the bench.
Nearly all the state’s four dozen senior judges — jurists who have technically retired but remained on the bench in a time-limited capacity — similarly had not filed disclosures with the Secretary of State’s office, but rather to the judicial department as part of their contract to work part-time.
Although still deciding cases that run from felonies to family court, some senior judges hadn’t filed a disclosure to the secretary of state, where the law says the reports must go, in more than 16 years. At least seven senior judges stopped filing disclosures even before they retired from the bench, The Denver Gazette found, one of them by five years.
State Court Administrator Steven Vasconcellos on Nov. 3 emailed judges statewide reminding them of their requirement to file the disclosures and of a pair of trainings the Secretary of State’s office was conducting on how that should be done.
The trainings on Nov. 16-17 in part were also to educate jurists of changes to the new disclosure law: The documents will be available online for the first time and must be filed electronically.
“The (secretary of state) collaborated with the SCAO on two training sessions … covering the topic of personal financial disclosure statements,” Secretary of State spokesman Jack Todd said in an email. “Members of our campaign finance team ran the trainings; it was organized by the SCAO.”
Posting the filings online is a way of confirming a judge had met the annual deadline. The Denver Gazette found several instances where judges said they had faxed or emailed a document only to learn from the newspaper it had not been received.
Vasconcellos also wrote that he has asked Attorney General Phil Weiser to give an opinion on whether the law requires senior judges to file with the Secretary of State, acknowledging the lack of clarity in the statute.
Colorado law requires an array of elected and appointed officials — ranging from the governor to members of the public utilities commission as well as judges — to annually disclose their financial holdings at the secretary of state’s office to identify potential conflicts of interest. That includes whether there are any material changes to that information from one year to the next or not. The filings are public and available on request, but the new law would make them available on a state website within two weeks of their filing.
The Denver Gazette learned that senior judges were often left to decide for themselves whether the disclosure laws applied to them. Some did; some didn’t.
And no one was tracking whether all the judges in the state had made the required filings.
Weiser’s office, through a spokesman, would not say whether its opinion regarding senior judges had been issued, saying only there was “no public legal opinion” to share.