LegiStorm

The Obama campaign today released vice-presidential candidate Sen. Joe Biden's tax returns for the past 10 years, and LegiStorm has them available here.

The two presidential candidates, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), released their own tax returns during the primary campaign, which can be seen here and here.

Although LegiStorm remains focused on matters related to Capitol Hill rather than the White House, we have included these tax returns to provide additional information to the Personal Financial Disclosures we already have for these candidates in their capacity as U.S. Senators.

Because of the public interest regarding the presidential candidates, we have also included more historical financial disclosure data for both the candidates and their staff.

LegiStorm's staff salary information has been become the subject of a heated congressional campaign in Indiana's 9th District. The race is pitting incumbent Democratic Rep. Baron Hill against Republican Mike Sodrel, who defeated Hill for the post in 2004.

Hill alleges Sodrel's office did not co-operate after Hill's 2006 victory, making Hill's transition back into Congress difficult. Sodrel's campaign has countered by pointing out Hill raised his staff salaries about 84 percent after his defeat in 2004.

Hill paid his staff a total of $181,943 in the third quarter of 2004. The number jumped to $334,005 in the fourth quarter despite adding only one person to the staff.

You can see all of the salaries paid by Hill here. Sodrel's staff salaries are here.

Once again, a member of Congress is in trouble for filing false financial disclosures.

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) announced Monday he will repay back taxes on unreported income he received from a rental property in the Dominican Republic - income he also did not report as required on his Personal Financial Disclosures.

In Rangel's most recent financial disclosure, he lists the villa in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, as an asset worth between $250,001 and $500,000, with no rental income. However, it has recently become known the Congressman earned about $75,000 in income from the property since 1988.

Yesterday's indictment of Kevin Ring, a former legislative director to Rep. John Doolittle (R-Calif.) and colleague of disgraced superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, is further evidence of the need for accurate financial disclosures by members of Congress and their top aides.

The 10-count indictment alleges that Ring made false statements about receiving a $135,000 kickback himself, as well as showering Doolittle and others with illegal gifts. Prosecutors say that congressional officials were filing false financial disclosures regarding these gifts because doing so would have been admitting to receiving illegal gifts.

The indictment says that Ring provided legislative and executive branch officials with gifts in exchange for official actions. They include all-expenses-paid domestic and international trael, fundraising assistance, meals, drinks, golf, sports tickets and employment opportunities to spouses, including Doolittle's wife.

Ring's attorney said his client had cooperated with authorities but would not plead guilty to false charges.

Since earlier this year, LegiStorm has provided all available financial disclosures for congressional staffers. Kevin Ring's own disclosures, as well as salary data, are not on our site because he quit work on Capitol Hill more than a decade ago, before the earliest records in our database. But it highlights the need for this data to be more available for public scrutiny.

We have added a small but important feature to our site that should make it much easier to find people on LegiStorm even if you don't know the exact form of their name.

The names of all the congressional staffers on our site come primarily from official salary records. If we get other information that suggest those names are a bit off (and they sometimes are), we will correct them. But that still leaves a lot to be desired because Jonathan may be the person's name but someone searching for Jon won't find him.

Thanks to a new feature, that's changing. We now give users the capability of searching under alternate names, whether that is a nickname or a maiden name. And users can also suggest alternate names for our site.

Take as an example the veteran political strategist Cathy Gillespie, the wife of former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie. We have her official name listed as Catherine H Gillespie because that's how she was listed in salary records. But now we also list her more common name of Cathy Gillespie, and if her high school friends want to find her, we also have her listed by her maiden name of Cathy Hay. http://www.legistorm.com/person/Catherine_H_Gillespie/22016.html

Of course, we don't have alternate names for tens of thousands of congressional aides in our database. We have only a relative handful right now, but we plan to add more over time and we have added the capability for users to help us out. On every person's page below their name we have a "Suggest an alternate name" link. So please help build out our database by adding alternate names you know. We will screen them for appropriateness before putting them on the site