At the beginning of December, City Hall published “All In The Family,” a five-part investigative series on www.cityhallnews. com about the Working Families Party. The Party was shown to actually have at least four different arms, enabling it to employ a web of for-profits and non-profits that take in and spend money beyond the rules generally governing political activity. A pay-for-influence arrangement in endorsements was revealed, along with the details of the Party’s lobbying operation, as was its method of paying workers outside of the labor laws the Party itself has championed.

The questions are not of ideology: on nearly every general plank of its platform, Working Families is in line with most New Yorkers, and its specific goals match the overwhelming pro-union positions of so many people who actually head to the polls. The questions are about whether the Working Families has in fact lived up to the principles it espouses, and, more importantly, whether it has adhered to the rules as it has risen.

Has the Working Families hit upon something so revolutionary, so far beyond anything the Republican or Democratic parties have attempted, because they are ingeniously innovative? Or have they arrived at this place because others have been wary of pushing the limits in quite this way? Or because, as some suspect, there is something much more deliberate at play?

There is legal, and there is right. The Working Families should be living up to both. And enough people have their doubts about whether the leadership needs to do more than simply pay Skadden Arps to do a private review. There need to be some explanations publicly, and directly from the leadership.

Here are some of the questions that they can begin answering, most of which Working Families officials opted not to answer over the course of City Hall’s own inquiries:

• What specific methods are undertaken to ensure that the many overlaps between the Working Families Party, Working Families Organization, the Progressive America Fund and Data & Field Services do not run afoul of any of the many tax and legal regulations involved? Why do so few people working for or with any of the entities seem to be aware of these distinctions?

• Why do so many people who regularly deal with what is supposedly a separate branch of the Working Families believe they are dealing only with the political party, to the point that they are almost always unaware that the other branches even exist?

• The Working Families Party routinely argues that its practices are in line with both the letter and the spirit of the law. Whether they have been in the letter of the law is for officials to determine. But can they reasonably say that they are holding to the spirit of the law in a way that would satisfy the standards they ask others to hold to?

• Why have there consistently been so many problems with the records of the Working Families Party, from the late campaign finance filings with the state Board of Elections over the summer, to the sporadic rent payments (and the one marked as being for “401 K PMT”), to the problematic records that caused the former treasurer to resign?

• How can the Working Families Party justify giving bigger weighted votes in endorsements and nominations to the unions that pay more money into its supposedly separate non-profit, the Working Families Organization?

• Why is ACORN paying the salaries, and possibly the rent as well, of Working Families employees?

• And most importantly: given how much evidence there is of blurred lines and strange overlaps, why does the Working Families so adamantly refute the idea that there are connections? If there is nothing wrong with what they are doing, why did it take months of resisted digging by City Hall to uncover what is going on?

The leadership of the Working Families Party has generally attributed all the recent criticism the party has faced to poor communication of their new methods, pointing out that, aside from the Campaign Finance Board ruling in September, most of the public criticism it has come under has been at the hands of news stories, editorials and political rivals.

But a growing number of political professionals believe that will eventually change, especially with all the eyes that will soon be going over the internal operations at 2-4 Nevins Street. There is the Randy Mastro lawsuit against Data & Field Services on Staten Island, in which Debi Rose’s lawyer initially resisted providing documents on Fifth Amendment self-incrimination grounds. There is also the City Campaign Finance Board’s standard series of audits of all the campaigns that took matching funds this year, and the Skadden Arps review.

But the Mastro lawsuit is focused only on Data & Field Services, and the Campaign Finance Board audits are focused only on Data & Field Services and the Working Families Party. The Skadden Arps review will have a wider scope, though it is not expected to look at the Progressive America Fund, despite the connections to the Working Families Party through the Fund’s Center for Working Families and National Open Ballot Project.

So if there are to be a full set of answers, it will have to come from somewhere else. If the Working Families really stands behind all its statements and demands for transparency, reform and a new approach to politics, the answers should start coming from the people in charge of the Working Families themselves.