Legistorm: Transparency's Sidekick

LegiStorm has released the latest available staff salary data from the House of Representatives, covering the first quarter of 2008.

This is the first of two large data releases we expect today. We hope to have all of the financial disclosures on our site by the end of the morning. The Clerk of the House has not made it easy, however, as they have lumped many financial disclosures together in one file, meaning that we have to extract all the individual member financial disclosures from these larger files.

The Senate releases its salary data every six months. The Senate has released the data from the six months ending on March 31, 2008 but we are still busy entering it into our database and editing it. We do not yet have an exact date for our release but think it might be as soon as next week.

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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.

Due to user demand, we have added a small new feature to our website: salary totals by year.

On staffer pages, this means that you can see the total paid in any one calendar year or fiscal year (unfortunately, the Senate reports their salaries in six-month semesters beginning Oct. 1, so only fiscal year reporting is available).

You can see a sample staffer page here: http://www.legistorm.com/person/Huma_Abedin/2909.html. Note that the annual amounts can be misleading. They do not represent the annual rate of pay. Instead, they merely reflect all gross salary payments made in that year (as always, taxes are included and expense reimbursements are not included). As a result, it is important to see if the aide worked for the full period or merely a fraction of the time. 

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