The North Carolina Ethics Commission (NCEC) has just given the green light to lobbyists to have sex with public officials and keep it quiet.

The NCEC says that because sex has no financial cost and thus is not a “thing of value”, no lobbyists or public officials have to reveal if sexual favors have been traded for influence in government actions.

“Consensual sexual relationships do not have monetary value and therefore are not ‘reportable expenditures made for lobbying’ for purposes of the lobbying law’s expenditure reporting provisions,” the commission’s advisory opinion states.

“Thus if the lobbyist does not receive payment from the lobbyist principal for engaging in the sexual relationship which you reference, which the commission presumes to be the case here, those activities would not constitute goodwill lobbying and would therefore not trigger a registration requirement,” the opinion continues.

The case was called “hypothetical” by some observers of the Commission.  It was noted that in 2012, the chief of staff for then-House Speaker Thom Tillis, now a U.S. Senator, was forced to resign when the commission investigated his intimate relationships with two registered lobbyists.