The company has installed a dozen lobby units in hotels in California mostly in convention center and conference areas as well as the San Jose and San Francisco hotels.
Ernst & Young L.L.P. has agreed to combine with a prominent Washington lobbying company, Washington Counsel P.C., to create a new lobbying unit separate from the Ernst tax department.
Just last week, the group ended an eight-year affiliation with the American Securitization Forum, its bondholder lobbying unit, after the groups failed to resolve how they would treat their members' increasingly divergent interests.
Facebook, Apple and Google set up lobbying units within D.C. years ago.
Both Mr. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, criticized a three-star general in command of Army forces in the Pacific for urging those who support the ban to write their elected officials and lobby their unit's leaders.
The low pay commission, which is currently taking evidence from employers and unions around the country and is due to recommend a rate for the minimum wage next spring, has been asked to consider lower rates for young workers in the teeth of opposition from the TUC and the respected Low Pay Unit lobby group.
As the Cultural Revolution drew to an end, his work unit lobbied to get him a chance to study English in Beijing.
He wanted it tall, of course, but he also wanted it good, and most of all he wanted it his, bearing the sign and smell of his presence all over it: "Chrysler approved the tower design; he approved the parabolic curves of the dome; he approved the Rouge Flamme marble for the lobby, the heating units, and the steel office partitions".
The proposed tax "would have damaging implications for growth, jobs and investment beyond the member states involved," said Leo Ringer, the head of the lobby's financial services unit.
Clients could wait in that handsome lobby while their Portovault unit was taken down to a heated room in the basement.
