LegiStorm

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.

The newspaper Politico used our site to publish a story today about how Hill staffers often have to scrape by on their wages. Politico points out that for entry-level staffers, "living on the cheap is not a measure of frugality but a means of survival."

While some staffers, especially committee aides, command more than $150,000 a year, the competition for the entry-level jobs is such that it is a buyer's market.

But Politico may have understated the case. They said that after taxes, some staffers make only $25,000. Actually, our salary figures are gross figures before the removal of taxes and other deductions. And our data shows quite a few congressional aides make $25,000 or less before taxes. As Politico says, in an expensive town like Washington, $25,000 does not go nearly so far as in most of the rest of the country.

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.

Note that because these senators are of great public interest, we have also included more historical financial disclosure data for both the candidates and their staff.

UPDATE: McCain has released his tax returns from the past two years, which can be seen at the link above. The campaign's release regarding his returns is here.

Technorati Profile

The public has spoken - and they appear to like what we are doing.

For several weeks we have been a bit beaten up. Congressional aides spoke of our site in sometimes vitriolic and, frankly, paranoid terms about how we invaded their privacy by publishing financial disclosures.

One staffer accused us of aiding the break-in of a home; others talked darkly about potential kidnappings and Russian gangsters. Many suggested lawsuits against us, at times for disclosing information that was already disclosed in the white pages delivered to homes and in Internet-searchable phone books. To be sure, there were some legitimate privacy issues raised but we have always believed the public right to know has trumped any privacy concerns that we have not already addressed.

When the story was a "local" one, confined to the congressional campus, we sensed the outrage about our publication of personal financial disclosures building to a level of hysteria - where the most absurd claims would be adopted as fact by an angry group of staffers. But the mood began to change dramatically yesterday when the Washington Post published a piece about how staffers were livid. NPR's All Things Considered ran an interview with LegiStorm founder Jock Friedly and American Public Media's Marketplace (also heard on many public radio stations nationwide) ran their own story. Salon and other publications joined in.

An encouraging thing happened: The broader public began to flood us with their private emails of encouragement. Dozens of others wrote complementary comments on our new blog. The Washington Times editorialized in favor of us.

We appreciate the support and we can assure you that we will continue to fight for all reasonable public disclosure measures while taking measures to protect staffer privacy where that does not damage the public's right to konw.