Representative Mark Pocan is a Democratic legislator from Wisconsin and a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council [3] (ALEC). He joined the organization in order to get an insider's perspective on how the organization worked. He blogged [4] about his experience at ALEC's 2011 meeting in New Orleans for the Progressive Magazine.

Pocan sent a letter [5] to Representative Dave Frizzell, the Chairman of ALEC's public board, expressing his concerns about ALEC's 501(c)(3) non-profit status. "As you know, organizations cannot conduct more than 20% of its work as political lobbying to qualify for this non-profit tax-deductible status. Having attended multiple ALEC conventions, it is clear to me that ALEC's primary role IS as a lobbying advocacy organization."

Pocan's letter comes hard on the heels of the Sunday New York Times story [6] illustrating instances in which ALEC was successful in altering state legislation and today's announcement [7] by the good government group Common Cause that it was filing 4,000 pages of materials with the IRS documenting ALEC's "massive underreporting of lobbying" and "misuse of charity laws."

Pocan presented a bill in the Wisconsin Legislature earlier this year called the ALEC Accountability Act [8] that would require ALEC to register as a lobbying group and require it to disclose corporate funded scholarships to legislators.