The Capitol Building is shown in the background.
Rebecca Zisser is an Insider.
Records about staffers' finances and conflicts of interest are hard to get.
You have to go to the US Capitol to access financial records.
Many staffers were violating the STOCK Act. Several refused to explain their reasons.
Legal experts say that the lack of transparency isn't a bug.
Three Insider political reporters tried to get public records about the personal finances of congressional staffers.
These records are not supposed to be state secrets. The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act requires them. Any American should have reasonable access to them.
They don't.
This is a story about how Congress makes it nearly impossible to get and understand information designed to defend against conflicts of interest, and how we went and did it anyway.
You can call to get copies of congressional staffers' personal financial disclosures. Senate records are $0.20 per page. When we tried, we were asked to fill out forms to get the records, which could take weeks. You have to physically go to Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, to get these records without playing phone tag or waiting. The House Cannon Building basement and the Senate Hart Building have windowless rooms where computers can be found.
Some may wonder why that matters. Why did we spend so much time looking at these records? Senior congressional staffers have access to sensitive information that is not available to the public in closed-door meetings.
They could be taking advantage of these privileges and making certain well-timed stock investments, which could go against current regulations.
Congressional staffers who make more than $132,552 a year in 2020 and 2021, are required to reveal what they bought and sold.
Insider realized in August that the only way to find out if senior congressional staffers were violating the law was to manually check every single financial disclosure and reported stock trade. It took a long time to scroll through financial records on Capitol Hill.
We spent a lot of time on Capitol Hill, but in the end we looked at every filing from the start of 2020 to the end of August 2021.
That meant sifting through more than 8,300 files from high-ranking House and Senate staffers.
Warren learned that roughly 200 people had filed their disclosures late. The process taught us that elected officials and their staff were willing to go to great lengths to hide information they were required to make public. We learned it was done by design after talking to experts.
It took me half a day to figure out where the financial disclosures were located. The Cannon Office Building basement has the House records. The Senate records are located elsewhere.
I had to type my name, address, and organization into the computer that was not working before I could start searching.
I realized that it wasn't easy to find these records. You can't just type in "Nancy Pelosi" or "Kevin McCarthy" and see the financial disclosures submitted by their senior staff. The documents from the House don't say which member of Congress each person works for. If you look at a document, you will only see the abbreviation for the state or the district. Try to memorize that for a group of people.
To see all the filings reported so far, you can select a year, such as 2021. There is no way to limit the search to a specific time frame. Good luck checking the records every week, hoping to spot new filings. You can't. Pick up where you left off after going through them all.
It became clear that getting a full picture of congressional staffers' financial interests would be a tall order. The Insider DC Bureau colleagues and I got it done.
I thought it would be easy to find out what kind of stocks congressional staffers were trading. I was wrong.
The Senate public-records office is located on the second floor of the Hart Senate Office Building. There is a flag in front of the glass doors. You can see the computers on the right side when you enter the room. A sign on the door said "Be back in 15" when I arrived. The person running the office took short breaks. They wouldn't allow me to stay alone when the office-keeper went on a break. One hour's worth of work to find information is often turned into two or three hours' worth of work because of the constant delays.
Due to the Pandemic, only one Senate staffer was allowed to work in the office. That made it more difficult to access the records.
The "out for a quick errand" sign on the Hart Building's second floor was the bane of our existence.
The Senate resource center is on either side of noon, so it's not a good idea to go there within an hour. It was equally frustrating to pop by earlier.
The Hart Senate Office Building houses the Office of Public Records.
I was waiting for the lone office staffer to come back from tending to their personal to-do list on more than one occasion. They'd go back and forth from Cups & Company. One aide was carrying a dry cleaning over their shoulder.
I showed up at 9:30 a.m. thinking I'd knock out the research in a few minutes. The errand sign promised me access within 10 minutes. I rushed to the first available terminal in order to get what I needed before the first round of votes.
Silly me.
The computer failed to start. The staffer tinkered with it for a while before moving to the next terminal. The one wouldn't turn on. He made a call. He nodded before hanging up. The staffer asked if I could come back later. I said I would return within an hour.
The staffer asked if he could make it after 2 p.m.
It was clear from our visits that most people didn't know that they could access these records. The Senate side's logbook hadn't been signed in months, so our day-after-day presence at these computers was definitely out of the ordinary.
The lower chamber of Congress had its own problems. There was only one computer terminal in the entire United States of America that could be used to view congressional staffers' financial information. We had to take turns using it.
Someone from congressional IT got a second computer working. The system was still complicated.
If someone trades a lot of stocks, they need to separate the reams of documents and download them separately. I had to scroll back and forth to see if staffers had disclosed their trades late or if they were the most late. I had to compare the different amendments they filed to see if they were late or if they were just to fix a mistake.
Some of the papers were very hard to read. This was true for members of Congress as well. The House and Senate both charge $0.10 per printed page, but printing the filings for closer inspection might have helped.
The basement room on Capitol Hill is where House staffers' disclosures are kept.
They want to make it difficult to find these records.
The public's right to access data about top congressional staffers' personal finances was supposed to be stronger. Senior congressional staffers' financial disclosures were to be posted online, just like they are for members of Congress, under the original STOCK Act that Congress passed in 2012.
The law mandated that the disclosures be "searchable, sortable, and downloadable," according to Craig Holman, a government-affairs lobbyist.
We have a different system today. Not even close.
How did it all go off track? One year after the STOCK Act became law, Congress quickly passed another bill that amended it. It was signed by President Barack Obama. The language that would have made it easy to find financial records of congressional staffers was gutted by this amendment. They all ended up in databases that were only accessible on the Hill.
The data on members of Congress is not easy to understand. There is no way to see how many members of Congress invest their money in a particular company, except to look at their individual filing. You can use a database created by Insider.
Dozens of congressional staffers were weeks, months, or even years late in filing their mandatory disclosures when we analyzed the congressional-staffer financial data we needed. I asked the Legislative Resource Center if it keeps records for people who violate the STOCK Act's deadlines and if they paid late fees. The clerk of the office said that the information was confidential.
Neither the House nor the Senate would speak about their internal processes. The names of the lawyers and financial professionals who vet everything for each chamber are posted online, but they provided no official guidance on whom congressional staff with filing-related questions should ask to speak to at the committee. They didn't give an explanation as to whether documentation exists that would verify claims of havinghed things out with ethics officials one way or the other.
The Senate Ethics team diverted every question to a dedicated phone line that handles all incoming calls, while the House Ethics stuck with the check-our-website slogan.
James Thurber, an American University professor and congressional-studies expert, told me that the lack of transparency about congressional staffers' financial records is intentional.
He said that they want to make it hard to find these records.
Walter Shaub, the former director of the US Office of Government Ethics, leads the government-ethics initiative at the Project on Government Oversight. I told him what it was like to dig up the data.
He said that it's not surprising that this is shocking. It's shocking that Congress is trying to break the spirit of its own laws.
He told me that when people want financial documents from the executive branch, all they have to do is send an email.
When we researched congressional staffers' financial information, my colleagues and I were all in DC. It's not true for everyone who wants to access that information. A political researcher from Alaska would need to take at least two flights, pay for a hotel, and go to Capitol Hill. It would be difficult on days when the congressional document repository has limited hours, such as during recess, when someone like Warren or me is monopolizing the limited computer terminals.
The director of policy and outreach at the Senior Executives Association told me that his organization supported amending the law in order to protect personal safety and security.
He said that being able to track someone down at their house where you know what their assets are and how much they are worth is a lot to put out there.
He said that the law could be improved. He doesn't think it's a good idea for senior staff to have their information posted online, but he thinks it's a good idea for journalists to have easier access to the records. The enforcement of the law was called inadequate by him.
The system doesn't allow reporters or the general public to independently verify if congressional staffers and members of Congress are paying fines for violating the STOCK Act. The word and honor of congressional staffers and lawmakers who may have violated the STOCK Act is the only thing we can rely on.
Because we couldn't confirm with other congressional committees and offices that lawmakers and staffers violated the law and therefore had to pay fines, we contacted congressional staffers and lawmakers themselves to confirm if they paid a $200 late fee.
Several people were transparent about what had happened and even provided us documentation, but many others refused to explain why they had violated the STOCK Act. Press representatives gave similar answers to our inquiries.
Congress has a terrible history of not trying to live up to ethical requirements it sets for both itself and the executive branch, lamented Shaub.
The problem is that Congress has no one watching over it. It's good to be king in this case.
Business Insider has an original article.
