LegiStorm: Transparency's Sidekick

LegiStorm has added the House of Represenatatives 2010 second quarter salary data to our database.

The salary information, covering April 1 - June 30, 2010, was released by the House as PDF files late last week. The House releases salary data quarterly, with the information usually made public about two months after the end of the quarter.

Once the files have been released as PDF files, we add the information into our database, then edit and research to make sure the names and salaries are correct. Thanks to improvements to our systems, this quarter we had our fastest turnaround from the time of the House's release until we were able to publish to our site. We will continue to revise our process to shorten the time it takes to get the information to our users.

Recent events have shown that to some lawmakers, politics is a family business.

Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) awarded thousands of dollars in scholarships to her relatives and an aide's children from Congressional Black Caucus Foundation funds, according to a report in the Dallas Morning News.

Not only did the scholarships violate the foundation's anti-nepotism rules, they all also broke foundation rules requiring scholarship recipients to live or study in a caucus member's district. Johnson originally denied any wrongdoing when first contacted by the paper, but a few days later issued a statement to acknowledge the rules violations, although she said she did so unknowingly.

Dick Meltzer took nearly a $1 million-a-year pay cut to leave his job as a lobbyist and work for Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Bill Hughes earned $320,000 in 14 months between Senate jobs. Kathy Damato earned $192,000 working for Sen. Chris Dodd's (D-Conn.) campaign - about $30,000 more than she could have made working for his official office.

These are just a few details that from the 2010 congressional staff personal financial disclosures, in which new staffers are required to list income from prior jobs and current staffers must  detail any outside income. 

The notes on the disclosures tell interesting stories, but they're not easy to find. All the financial disclosures are filled out by hand and filed as hard copy paper documents. In order to bring the information to our users, LegiStorm has reviewed each filing individually and manually enter the relevant data into our database. We've now completed a review of more than 2,500 personal financial disclosures filed by congressional staff in 2010 to find notable tidbits.

It's hard to keep a secret in the digital age.

In early July, The Hill's Twitter Room blog posted an item regarding Rep. Pete Roskam (R-Ill.) tweeting details of a trip to Israel. The story listed seven Republican lawmakers that accompanied Roskam, but had this to say about the other traveler:

LegiStorm has the data behind two big news stories this week regarding members of Congress and ethics.

Rep. Charles Rangel's (D-N.Y.) ethics problems have been in the news for some time, but yesterday the House Ethics Committee formally brought 13 charges against the representative.

Among the accusations are charges that Rangel "engaged in a pattern of submitting Financial Disclosure statement that were incomplete and inaccurate." Rangel filed amendments to his disclosures for 1998-2007, but not until the ethics investigation into the behavior had begun.