Money that was illegally collected from timeshare owners across the United States and used for political contributions will be paid back. The amount of money that must be repaid is $562,000, this is equal to the amount of illegal contributions that was collected by the U.S. vacation industry’s political fundraising arm. A deal was made between the vacation industry and the FEC that would give a payout to settle accusation of wrongdoing in the distribution and solicitation of over a million dollars in political contributions. A political action committee for the ARDA is also being forced to pay a civil penalty of $300,000, which is the largest fine the FEC has given since 2007.

The ARDA has recently released a statement admitting that they made some mistakes in the collection of their contributions. They said that these mistakes wee unfortunate and unintentional. They are now taking precautions to prevent this from happening in the future and to reconcile past errors. The ARDA is a huge lobbying group on Capitol Hill and has spent over $1 million to oppose mortgage reform legislation, which includes truth in lending requirements to timeshare buyers.

Most of the money that the ARDA Political Action Committees got came from thousands of timeshare owners who were paying their regular bills. The records sent to the FEC did not identify the individual contributors. The fee that most timeshare owners were paying was called the ARDA fee. Owners did not know what this fee was going to. Political contributions are supposed to be voluntary and some of their solicitations lacked that information according to the settlement. The settlement order was approved unanimously by a bipartisan commission on July 29 that contained six members. The Political Action Committee has 90 days to comply.

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