TWO DEVELOPMENTS in the State House in recent days hold the promise of making politics cleaner and elected officials more accountable to the public.

Last week, the House followed Gov. Mark Sanford’s lead and voted to give the State Ethics Committee the $300,000 it needs to start an electronic filing system for campaign reports. The system, which a Senate Finance subcommittee also recommended fully funding, would allow the public to find out who’s giving money to candidates just by logging onto the Internet.

Earlier this month, House Speaker David Wilkins appointed a special panel to review the state’s ethics and campaign finance laws. That move was prompted in part by a series by The State’s Aaron Gould Sheinin, who found that legislators are doing as bad a job as ever of complying with the reporting requirements that are the very foundation of the campaign finance law — and that they’re getting away with it. News that a third of House members and a quarter of senators filed incomplete or inaccurate reports during the last half of 2004, and that the House Ethics Committee doesn’t even review the reports to determine whether they comply with the law, should refocus attention on how inappropriate it is for the House and Senate ethics committees to police their own members’ conduct.

That task should fall to the independent State Ethics Commission, just as it does for all other elected officials. The legislative panels’ involvement should be limited to questions of whether legislators should be expelled for their misdeeds.

We don’t hold out a lot of hope that Mr. Wilkins’ panel will suggest such a radical change, since the Legislature has always been adamantly opposed to it. However, it certainly should be on the table, along with other proposals to stiffen penalties, ensure compliance and in other ways broaden the 13-year-old ethics and campaign finance law.

But while questions of whether to change the law’s focus or broaden its scope deserve careful consideration, some problems are clear, and need no study.

The most recent to come to light involves a provision added in 2003 that was supposed to require candidates to report the occupations of campaign donors. This requirement, long part of federal and other state laws, helps voters determine whom their elected officials are serving, by making patterns between donations and official actions easier to track.

The Senate Ethics Committee and the State Ethics Commission are requiring candidates they oversee to report this information. But House members and candidates don’t have to do the same, because the House Ethics Committee has concluded that the law merely requires candidates to collect the information.

The House panel is correct; there is no requirement in the law that candidates share this information with the public. But there is absolutely no reason to require candidates to collect information about donors’ occupations if they don’t have to share that information with voters. So either this was an error in the way the law was written, or else it was a deliberate attempt to deceive the public into believing that the law was tougher than it actually is. Either way, the Legislature should make quick work of closing the loophole and giving the public the information lawmakers claimed they were providing two years ago.

About the only thing less valuable than a law that isn’t enforced is one that doesn’t even require what it pretends to require.