SYLACAUGA — The area’s representative on the Alabama Board of Education has disputed a Daily Home report that she does not have all her required campaign finance reports on file with the Alabama secretary of state.

Stephanie Bell, state school board member for District Three, said she has reported her campaign contributions or filed waivers with the secretary of state in accordance with Alabama’s Fair Campaign Practices Act. She said she was not required to file reports for years in which she had no campaign contributions or expenditures.

The Daily Home reported Wednesday that some of Bell’s annual campaign finance reports were not available on the secretary of state’s website. Further reporting revealed that a number of files, including Bell’s waiver in lieu of her 2008 annual report, had been deleted from the website in a computer error several months ago. That file has since been restored to the website.

However, Janice McDonald, director of the elections division of the secretary of state’s office, said after looking through paper records, that while Bell did have a waiver on file for 2008, she did not have one for 2004 or for 2007. McDonald also said Bell’s online records were updated Friday to show all reports on file.

As the reports detail campaign activity for the previous year, the 2008 waiver denotes no activity in 2007. The missing reports would show activities in 2003 and 2006, both non-election years.

Bell said in a telephone interview on Thursday that she was not required to file those reports when she did not have any financial activity during the year.

“If you have no activity in your account, you don’t have to file,” she said. “Or, if you want to, you can file a waiver, which is what I did.”

Bell referred to a statement in the “Fair Campaign Practices Act Candidate Filing Guide,” issued by the secretary of state. The guide states that campaign committees do not have to file annual reports if they “have not reached the contribution/expenditure threshold or have had no activity during the reporting period.”

The same guide, however, states that elected officials are required to file reports every year they are in office: “All elected officials must file an annual report by January 31 each year, even if they have had no activity and even if they have dissolved their campaign finance committee. They may file either a form 1A, showing the lack of activity, or an optional waiver of report form.”

According to McDonald, Bell’s reading of the law is incorrect. McDonald said elected officials are required to file annually. “That (requirement) has not changed,” she said. “Elected officials should file an annual report.”

Bell has been elected to the state school board for every term since 1994.

When The Daily Home informed Bell that the guide specifies that elected officials do have to file annually, she said the filing guide to which she referred, the 2004-2005 edition, did not have that statement.

“Those are the instructions that we have, and that is what was in effect for that time,” she said.

But the 2004-2005 edition does contain the same statement, under the chapter titled “Elected Officials.”

After reading the section on “Elected Officials” in the 2004-2005 guide, Bell’s attorney and husband John Bell conceded their reading of the guide may have been in error. “I will consider this,” he said. “They may have two contradictory things in here.”

Both Bell and her husband said she had submitted all required reports. She also said she had copies of those reports but had not produced the two missing from the secretary’s office as of Friday evening.

McDonald said she looked through Bell’s file multiple times to find the two reports.

“I went back and double-checked,” McDonald said. “They would have been stamped for January 2004 and 2007.”

The filing guide also states the law has “severe penalties” for failing to submit reports, including fines and being removed from office.

The Daily Home reported in February that Bell’s opponent in the 2008 Republican primary, Troy “Skip” Smithwick of Sylacauga, had been indicted for being nine months late in filing the final report on his campaign contributions and for irregularities in reporting the source of a $100,000 contribution from a political action committee. The violations he has been charged with are Class B misdemeanors under the Fair Campaign Practices Act.

Smithwick’s attorney Rod Giddens has filed motions to dismiss the charges, claiming that the annual report requirement was not uniformly enforced and that Smithwick was the victim of “selective prosecution.” At a hearing in Talladega Circuit Court on Tuesday, Giddens told Judge Julian King that many state officials had not filed the reports.

“We believe, based on an initial factual inquiry, that violations of those reporting provisions are rather common in Alabama political campaigns; that responsible state officials know that such violations are rather common; yet that such violations are practically never prosecuted,” the motion stated.

State school board member Betty Peters made the complaint against Smithwick. She asked Attorney General Troy King to look into it at a meeting in Houston County in August, as reported in The Dothan Eagle.

Other members of the state BOE, David Byers, Mary Jane Caylor and Ethel Hall, filed their reports after the deadline, according to copies of their reports on the secretary of state’s Web site. Other elected officials or candidates who filed after the Jan. 31 deadline included gubernatorial candidates Bradley Byrne, Tim James and Ron Sparks.