Marcus Carey reports that now-Lt. Gov. Daniel Mongiardo paid a $7,840.00 fine to the Federal Elections Commission on October 9, 2007. The fine stems from activity relating to his 2004 U.S. Senate race against Jim Bunning, which he lost.

Carey takes issue with the fact that Mongiardo’s campaign account has remained open the past four years with a $600,000 debt.

Sidenote: Kudos to the first person who guesses which Kentucky Democrat has had an account for U.S. Senate open longer than Daniel Mongiardo.

Brett Hall, who usually makes crap up, is fairly spot-on with his assertion that Mongiardo’s campaign was audited in 2006, noting that the FEC took issue with four things.

Read the rest – including information from Mongiardo – after the jump…

• Misstatement of cash-on-hand
• Failure to file 48-hour notices
• Failure to file Form 3Z-1
• Disclosure of outstanding debt

Read the entire Mongiardo audit here (pdf).

According to Brett, “The FEC’s administrative fine program deals specifically with failure to report on-time, so we suspect that the audit’s findings that Mongiardo failed to filed required 48-hour notices is the reason for the fine.”

Sources close to Mongiardo tell us the 2004 Senate campaign was in fact fined over some junk surrounding the 48-hour reporting guidelines the FEC has yet to modernize. Turns out the Mongiardo campaign received several credit card contributions during the period in which a Senate campaign must report donations above a certain amount to the FEC (usually the couple days or so leading up to an election). The problem: the campaign didn’t know they’d received the contributions until well after 48 hours had passed and had no way of knowing at the time– because the card processing vendor didn’t let them know. This affected cash on-hand, debts, etc. and ultimately resulted in a fine.

So there you have it. Nothing major at all. Something that’s actually happened many times on other federal races. Times have changed since 2004, though, and it’s now possible to use vendors who let you know immediately when a card transaction is processed. Meaning the FEC probably won’t need to update their out-of-date guidelines.