ALEC, a Tax-Exempt Group, Mixes Legislators and Lobbyists Stephen Spaulding, left, and Nick Surgey of Common Cause, with American Legislative Exchange Council documents. Desperate for new revenue, Ohio lawmakers introduced legislation last year that would make it easier to recover money from businesses that defraud the state. It was quickly flagged at the Washington headquarters of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a business-backed group that views such "false claims" laws as encouraging frivolous lawsuits. ALEC's membership includes not only corporations, but nearly 2,000 state legislators across the country - including dozens who would vote on the Ohio bill. One of them, Bill Seitz, a prominent Republican state senator, wrote to a fellow senior lawmaker to relay ALEC's concerns about "the recent upsurge" in false-claims legislation nationwide. "While this is understandable, as states are broke, the considered advice from our friends at ALEC was that such legislation is not well taken and should not be approved," he said in a private memorandum. The legislation was reworked to ease some of ALEC's concerns, making it one of many bills the group has influenced by mobilizing its lawmaker members, a vast majority of them Republicans. Despite its generally low profile, ALEC has drawn scrutiny recently for promoting gun rights policies like the Stand Your Ground law at the center of the Trayvon Martin shooting case in Florida, as well as bills to weaken labor unions and tighten voter identification rules. Amid the controversies, several companies, including Coca-Cola, Intuit and Kraft Foods, have left the group. Most of the attention has focused on ALEC's role in creating model bills, drafted by lobbyists and lawmakers, that broadly advance a pro-business, socially conservative agenda. But a review of internal ALEC documents shows that this is only one facet of a sophisticated operation for shaping public policy at a state-by-state level. The records offer a glimpse of how special interests effectively turn ALEC's lawmaker members into stealth lobbyists, providing them with talking points, signaling how they should vote and collaborating on bills affecting hundreds of issues like school vouchers and tobacco taxes. The documents - hundreds of pages of minutes of private meetings, member e-mail alerts and correspondence - were obtained by the watchdog group Common Cause and shared with The New York Times. Common Cause, which said it got some of the documents from a whistle-blower and others from public record requests in state legislatures, is using the files to support an Internal Revenue Service complaint asserting that ALEC has abused its tax-exempt status, something ALEC denies. "We know its mission is to bring together corporations and state legislators to draft profit-driven, anti-public-interest legislation, and then help those elected officials pass the bills in statehouses from coast to coast," said the president of Common Cause, Bob Edgar. If that's not lobbying, what is? ALEC argues that it provides a forum for lawmakers to network and to hear from constituencies that share an interest in promoting free-market, limited-government policies. Lobbying laws differ by state, and ALEC maintains that if any of its members" interactions with one another happen to qualify as lobbying in a particular state, that does not mean ALEC, as an organization, lobbies. Mr. Seitz, who sits on ALEC's governing board, said he believed that liberal groups like Common Cause are attacking the organization out of frustration that "they don't have a comparable group that is as effective as ALEC in enacting policies into law." He said that ALEC was not much different from other professional associations that represent state legislators, and that members were free to ignore or disagree with the group's policy positions. "This concept that private companies are writing the bills and handing them to gullible legislators to trundle off and pass is false," Mr. Seitz said. There is nothing new, surprising or sinister about private-sector organizations coming together with legislators to share ideas and learn from each other.