Proposed Utah bill would make elected officials disclose foreign government gifts

SALT LAKE CITY — A Utah lawmaker wants the state’s elected officials to have to disclose if a foreign government gives them a gift, like paying for a trip.

Rep. Candice Pierucci, R-Herriman is running the bill. She said the bill is not a direct response to recently reported trips to Qatar by Utah Senate President Stuart Adams and Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes.

Pierucci said the bill came about after her own brush with a trip proposal.

“Taiwan had reached out and said, hey, we’d love for you to come visit our country. And I started looking into the process of how do I report this?”

Pierucci said she looked into guidelines for reporting paid trips. “There weren’t any, which was concerning to me.”

“There has been across the nation countries like China, the Chinese Communist Party to kind of wine and dine legislators and take them out on trips,” Pierucci said, adding, “There are other countries who are allies who reach out to us as legislators to invite us on these trips.”

But, Pierucci said, if the bill had been in place, Adams and Reyes’ trips “would have had to have been disclosed as a gift.”

Pierucci also ran this bill last year.