Legistorm: Transparency's Sidekick

LegiStorm has now completed the upload of all personal financial disclosures filed in 2008 for all House and Senate members and aides.

We uploaded the members of the House and Senate the same morning they were released but the staff have been a much bigger chore. We uploaded Senate staff last week and have now just completed the House staff.

All in all, we have 1,727 disclosures from members of Congress, including amendments. We have 4.850 disclosures for aides. All are avaiable to users who register for free.

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We at LegiStorm were fascinated to read a story in Politico this week which polled the offices of all senators to find out where they got their mortgages, especially by the answer of the former head of the Senate banking committee, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.).

The Politico survey comes after documents reveal that two senators, Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), received preferential treatment on their mortgages from Countrywide after requesting help from the head of the company. So Politico surveyed senators to find out how others received their mortgages. So far, 15 senators have not bothered to answer the poll.

But we were particularly intrigued by the response of Shelby, who headed the Senate Banking, House and Urban Affairs Committee and is still its ranking member. According to Politico, Shelby responded that he has no mortgages on his two homes. In fact, LegiStorm's data indicates that Shelby has a $1-$5 million mortgage with Wells Fargo Bank.

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LegiStorm has now released all Personal Financial Disclosures filed by Senate aides in 2008. The disclosures include the annual reports filed by staffers by the May 15 deadline, as well as letters granting extensions to those staffers who asked for more time to file.

Only certain staffers are required to file disclosures. Generally, those required to file are the highest-paid staffers, who also tend to be the most senior ones who crafting legislation and policy. The disclosures serve as one tool to highlight any possible conflicts of interest or other financial issues involving these key legislative employees.

We have left out a handful of staffers who have filed but who are not listed in our current salary database, such as employees of special commissions. We will be adding them soon.

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LegiStorm released all of the personal financial disclosures of all members of the U.S. House of Representatives who have filed their reports on time. The Monday morning release follows on the heels of LegiStorm's Friday release of disclosures for all senators.

A list of those members of Congress who have filed for extensions is located at http://www.legistorm.com/2008HouseExtensions.pdf. Some of those who have received extensions have already turned in their reports and we have made those available.

The disclosures came to us from the Clerk of the House in sideways fashion (a result of the fact that the original documents are in landscape orientation, but scanners don't typically take documents in landscape format). LegiStorm likes to make these forms more useful to users by rotating them but because of the rush to get the files up on the web, the rotation of the files will have to wait for a little while.

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UPDATE: All of the house PFDs are now rotated for our users' convenience. As you look through the disclosures, please leave a comment if you find anything of interest.

The latest personal financial disclosures of U.S. senators are now available at LegiStorm, www.legistorm.com.

Several disclosures have not been released, most notably Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), who just ended her bid for the presidency. No reason was provided in the letter from the Secretary of the Senate which granted the extension.

Also filing for extensions were Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (R-R.I.)

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Each year in mid-June, reporters madly scramble to the House and Senate records rooms to get copies of the personal financial disclosures for members of Congress. This year LegiStorm hopes to make that scramble unnecessary for many reporters.

We have received word that the Senate financial disclosures are to be released Friday morning. If all goes as planned, we think we can have the records on our site by the end of the morning. The House records are to be released Monday and those too, we hope to have up by noon of that day.

Financial disclosures for congressional aides will take longer. While member disclosures are made available by the Congress in electronic form on CDs for those who pay for it, disclosures for staffers must be gathered and uploading in a much more painstaking process that involves finding them on congressional computers, then printing, scanning and uploading them. We hope to have our first staffer data available by Tuesday of next week but it will take days to get the more than 2,000 disclosures organized onto the web.

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The Wall Street Journal ($$) has a story in today's edition highlighting the importance of personal financial disclosures for members and their staff.

Russell Caso, a former chief of staff to Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), admitted his wife received payments from a group with ties to the Russian government but he did not report the payments on his personal financial disclosure as required, according to The Journal's anonymous sources with knowledge of court documents. Caso pleaded guilty to not disclosing the payments in December, but the origin of the funds wasn't known until now. The sources identified International Exchange Group as the source of a $19,000 payment for "editing work." The WSJ quotes a speech by Weldon in which he said the company had ties to senior Russian military, intelligence and political officials.

Caso's undisclosed payments are part of a larger corruption probe looking at Weldon, as well as a Justice Department inquiry into companies with Russian ties who are suspected of trying to gain improper influence in Washington.

The case points out yet again the usefulness of the personal financial disclosures of congressional staffers that we published in February to a surprising amount of controversy. The disclosures give a needed look at possible conflicts-of-interest by powerful staffers and members of Congress when everything is reported correctly. But often, the most interesting things about disclosures are what is left out.

Roll Call has clearly been spending some time on our site. The paper used LegiStorm's data for two stories on congressional employees this week.

In today's story Paul Singer looks at shared employees; staffers who provide IT or bookkeeping services to more than one office:

"According to payroll data compiled by LegiStorm, the salaries of many of these shared employees have skyrocketed over the past few years. For example, Susan Anfinson, a financial aide, earned just over $40,000 in 2003 from eight Congressional offices. In 2007, according to payroll records complied by LegiStorm, she earned over $141,000 in paychecks from 13 different offices.

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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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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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