Abstract: The Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) in the EU's Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) shall safeguard sound public finances in the EMU member states by allowing to punish countries with excessive deficits. We experimentally examine the voting procedure of the SGP and find that the institutional rules are not at all satisfactory. As an institutional innovation we test a procedure where fiscal sinners are excluded from voting as suggested by Otmar Issing. It turns out that this modification is surprisingly successful. In addition our study shows that the opportunity to communicate has a significant impact and tends to mitigate the pact's shortcomings.