LegiStorm

This afternoon, LegiStorm's site went down for a few minutes of planned downtime to upgrade a server. The upgrade was supposed to improve our overall performance and uptime.

But what was supposed to take only a few minutes turned into a several-hour ordeal.

We apologize for any inconvience users faced while we were down. This should lead to longer-term stability.

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.

Several shared employees have more than doubled their salaries in the past five years, according to LegiStorm¹s data. April Blankenship, a financial staffer for Republicans and Democrats, earned just under $50,000 in 2003 and just over $147,000 in 2007; Paul Nenninger earned under $73,000 in 2002 and about $159,000 in 2007, all from Texas Republicans. Thomas Gallagher, an IT staffer, earned about $49,000 in 2005 and over $105,000 in 2007."

And on Monday, Singer used LegiStorm's data to learn that some senior staffers took home more pay than the members they worked for, especially when the staffers earn money both from the congressional office and the member's campaign:

"For example, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) earned a Congressional salary of $165,200 in 2006. Steven Paikowsky, who served as her chief of the staff at the time, took a pay cut from about $156,000 in 2005 to about $107,000 in 2006, went on part-time status in the Congresswoman's office and earned an additional $171,500 as a campaign consultant for Wasserman Schultz and other candidates.

Eric Johnson, chief of staff for Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.), earned about $149,000 in Congressional pay in 2006, according to payroll records compiled by LegiStorm. He also earned $62,000 in campaign income that year, for about $50,000 more in earnings than Wexler."

Senior staffers are required to file personal financial disclosures including information on outside income, such as campaign work. LegiStorm makes researching such combined salaries easier, as we are the only place on the web with staffers' financial disclosures and staffer salaries.

As another story using our data pointed out, staffers making more than a certain amount of income are limited in how much they can make from other sources. Roll Call's story this week included a few instances were staffers had to refund money they'd made through a campaign because they'd violated the outside income limit.

Roll Call points out that many staffers set their congressional salary just below the threshold where outside income limits and the requirement to file a financial disclosure apply.

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."

Gifts and trips from foreign governments are easier to come by than ones provided by domestic interest groups because the ethics clampdown caused largely by the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal has not affected these rules. Foreign gifts are also governed by a separate law, the Foreign Gifts and Decorations Act.

Diplomatic protocol often requires the giving and acceptance of gifts. It could be considered rude to turn down a gift from a foreign country.

Interestingly, despite dozens of tangible gifts reported by the Senate and hundreds to executive branch officials, only one House official - former Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) - disclosed receiving gifts in the past five years. His largest gift was a $10,000 ceremonial dagger encrusted with precious metals and gems that was bestowed upon him by Morocco. While Hastert filed, his disclosures did not meet the legal requirement that they be filed within 60 days. Instead, they were all filed when he was leaving office and often covered items received years before.

The lack of other House disclosures is odd, especially given that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other House official have made high-profile trips overseas. Yet their lack of disclosures suggests that they have not received the customary treatment accorded to others, including even some Senate aides. House officials claimed to Roll Call that they have received gifts, but no gifts other than Hastert's were worth more than minimal amounts. But they also acknowledged they have had only a dozen items appraised in recent years.

The significance of the disclosures is that federal officials may keep any items that do not meet the reporting threshold. Items of greater value must be turned in to the government, or alternatively can be purchased by the recipient for the appraised value.

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.

LegiStorm's release provoked outrage on Capitol Hill, especially among House chiefs of staff, who met to discuss ways to shut LegiStorm disclosures down. There was talk of a publicly financed lawsuit.

But the series of recent concerns about chiefs of staff is proof of the value in such public accessibility of this information.

Today's story followed quickly on the heels of another story Roll Call wrote yesterday which used LegiStorm's financial disclosures to highlight the lack of disclosure about a potential conflict of interest between Rep. Steve Pearce (R-N.M.) and an energy business.

Roll Call said that Pearce sold the assets of his oil services company to Key Energy, a company that testified before a panel that he co-chaired, for a reported $12 million. However, Pearce's personal finance disclosure listed the value of the company at $1 million-$5 million, and he was not required to disclose the sale at all, because it was only for the assets of the company and not the company itself.

Roll Call takes pains to point out there is no evidence Pearce has promoted any legislation specifically to benefit Key Energy. But it appears without Key Energy's SEC filings detailing the sale, there would have been no way to see the connection.

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.

We should have yet another quarter's worth of data in a matter of days.