Legistorm: Transparency's Sidekick

LegiStorm has launched a new database of all foreign gifts (whether tangible gifts or travel) received by members of Congress and their staff in the past decade.

Our database covers from 1999 to the present. In that time, more than 450 gifts in all were reported having been received by congressmen and their aides by foreign governments. These gifts include tangible ones, such as a ceremonial sword, or travel, such as a ride in a military helicopter. Only gifts above what the law has determined to be "minimal value" is considered reportable. The Senate defines "minimal value" as $100, while the House and executive branch adjust the value by inflation. In 2008, the value for the House and executive branch was $335.

Roll Call's Jennifer Yachnin had a story this morning on the subject of foreign gifts: "Even as new ethics restrictions have made it difficult for Members and staff to accept gifts — aside from token baseball caps or T-shirts — one area remains where lawmakers and their staffs can collect trinkets more or less guilt-free: foreign travel."

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Roll Call used LegiStorm’s congressional data today to show that Chris Riley, chief of staff for Rep. Nathan Deal (R-Ga.), had made impermissible amounts of side income from congressman's campaign. In response to Roll Call's inquiries, Riley quickly returned more than $90,000 to Deal’s campaign committee.

The Capitol Hill newspaper used our salary and personal financial disclosure data for the article. What Roll Call discovered is that because Riley made enough congressional salary to qualify as a senior staffer, he was limited to making roughly $25,000 a year on the side. Riley told Roll Call he was unaware of the limits.

Riley is the fourth chief of staff in the House so far to come under public scrutiny about matters contained in personal financial disclosures after LegiStorm released its database of personal financial disclosures in late February.

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As we work on new products we have also been working on getting historical salary data into our database. This morning, we released a new quarter of salary data, the 3rd quarter of 2002 from the House of Representatives.

Entering the data is painstaking work, requiring manual data entry from books released by the House each quarter and the Senate each semester. Our salary database alone is approaching half a million records, all which must be checked and rechecked for accuracy. The data challenges are many. One of the hardest parts is to make sure that we don't confuse staffers with the same or similar names, while properly tracking a person as he she changes offices or even names. In the near future we expect to announce some changes to our database that will help us, and our users, track these changes.

As always, we depend on our site users to alert us to any errors they see. Please let us know if you see something that doesn't look right.

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The newspaper Politico used our site to publish a story today about how Hill staffers often have to scrape by on their wages. Politico points out that for entry-level staffers, "living on the cheap is not a measure of frugality but a means of survival."

While some staffers, especially committee aides, command more than $150,000 a year, the competition for the entry-level jobs is such that it is a buyer's market.

But Politico may have understated the case. They said that after taxes, some staffers make only $25,000. Actually, our salary figures are gross figures before the removal of taxes and other deductions. And our data shows quite a few congressional aides make $25,000 or less before taxes. As Politico says, in an expensive town like Washington, $25,000 does not go nearly so far as in most of the rest of the country.

We have added a small new feature to our site, which is the tax returns of the three main presidential candidates. While our mission has not expanded to cover the presidential race, we have their data because they are all U.S. senators. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has yet to release his tax filings, although he is expected to do so today. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) has not released her tax filing due in 2008 because she filed an extension. Instead, she released a statement with her expected income amounts from various sources.

You can find their tax forms on their personal financial disclosure pages, http://www.legistorm.com/memberdisclosure/76/Sen_Barack_Obama.html and http://www.legistorm.com/memberdisclosure/21/Sen_Hillary_Rodham_Clinton.html.

McCain's filings will be at http://www.legistorm.com/memberdisclosure/69/Sen_John_McCain.html when they become available.

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