Requiring both the candidates who take the money and the corporations and political action committees that give it to report their transactions makes sense. It is a good way to verify that both donor and donee are being honest.

But if nobody looks at both versions of the flow of campaign cash, side-by-side, that audit trail does no good.

Until the other day, when it was pointed out by The Salt Lake Tribune that such cross-checking was not being done, nobody in the Elections Division of the Lieutenant Governor's Office was doing that. Now, says Deputy Director Michael Cragun, they will.

The Tribune's check of the records turned up apparent violations by corporations and PACs, supporters of Republicans and Democrats. Now everybody has a chance to clean up their act before the next reporting deadline, which happens to be on Halloween.

The statute that sets up the state's campaign reporting requirements does not explicitly demand such a double-entry audit. But it does require that the elections office examine the forms and report any apparent violations to the Utah Attorney General's Office. Violation of the law is a class B misdemeanor.

Of course, no act is a crime if nobody knows about it. And it will be extremely difficult for anyone to know that something is missing from a report, or that a whole report has not been made, unless every source of information is followed up.

The only other way the state might be aware of such violations would be if someone on the inside of a campaign or a PAC blows the whistle. And that would be rare indeed when the only people who know about the gifts are going to be loathe to admit anything.

In fact, a clever enough conspiracy might succeed in hiding gifts on both ends of the transaction, totally frustrating the intent of the law. So this law isn't perfect.

But it's all we've got. So disclosure cross-checking not only needs to be done, it should be required by law.