LegiStorm: Transparency's Sidekick

LegiStorm has added the House of Representatives 2009 third quarter salary data to our database.

This is the first set of data taken from an electronic copy of the official record, the Statement of Disbursements of the House, which was published in PDF format on Nov. 30. Before this release, the information was released in large printed volumes that required us to enter the data by hand.

Having an electronic version of the document allowed us to cut the time required to get the information on the site down from about a month to less than two weeks. However, since this was the first electronic release most of that time was taken in redoing our procedures to handle the new data format. In the future we should be able to cut the turnaround time to three days or less.

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The House of Representatives today released its full expenses online for the first time.

The move was ordered by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) this summer. The first Statement of Disclosures to be published online was the House's third quarter books, which cover all expenses for all offices and members of the House of Representatives, including staff salaries. Until now, the expense books have only been available in heavy printed volumes. LegiStorm has put the salaries online by data-entering and editing the salaries before publishing them on our website.

The data was published as a searchable PDF document, a format that allows searching and basic browsing. However, unlike LegiStorm's salary database, the PDF version does not allow a user to sort or see all listings related to a single person over time, or even from one book. Many staffers receive pay both from a member and a committee, for instance. LegiStorm allows users to easily see the total compensation from all sources, unlike the House PDF.

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LegiStorm has added the 2009 first-quarter U.S. House of Representative staff salaries onto its site, giving the first look at the staff makeup for more than 50 freshmen members of Congress.

The new data include the salaries of all House staff from Jan. 1-March 31, 2009. The expenditures are released in thick printed volumes and LegiStorm has converted the salary records from paper to digital form and uploaded them to its database.

LegiStorm has already posted the Senate salaries covering the same period, as well as personal financial disclosures for House and Senate staffers.

 The Senate is expected to follow the House of Representative's lead and post all member expenses online, the Associated Press reports.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) proposed the measure, which was approved and added to an appropriations bill allocating funds for the congressional budget. A final compromise version of the appropriations bill will need to be approved by the House and Senate before the measure will go into effect.

This follows last month's announcement by the House that it would post the House's Statement of Disbursements "at the earliest date." Originally, that was expected to be the end of August. But The Hill reported last week that the House was going to delay the release until October to plan for the expected increase in online traffic.

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LegiStorm has uploaded and made available nearly 2,500 personal financial disclosures filed by House and Senate staffers in 2009.

Our financial disclosure database now includes the disclosures from all staffers from both houses of Congress who filed by the May 15 deadline. We will continue to add filings for those staffers who received extensions of the deadlines or who file amendments throughout the year.

LegiStorm already posted the financial disclosures of every member of Congress who filed by the deadline earlier this month.

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The House of Representatives Clerk's Office has accidentally released all of the personal financial disclosures of members of the House ahead of their scheduled release on Friday.

The 2009 financial disclosures went up on the Clerk's web site. They are now all on LegiStorm's site.

The disclosures were scheduled to be released June 12, but the Clerk of the House website briefly posted them yesterday and LegiStorm was able to download the available disclosures and post them (with all the pages rotated to the correct orientation for our users' convienence - the forms are released in a sideways fashion due to the scanning process).

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Closing a huge information gap, the House of Representatives expects to put the expense records of all representatives online.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) released a letter she sent to the House's chief administrative officer today, directing that the House's Statement of Disbursements be posted online "at the earliest date." The Statement of Disbursements includes all official expenses for each member, including salaries.

The expense reports have been released as printed volumes, running to thousands of pages covered in small type each quarter. The volumes were available in a basement office of a House office building.

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The amount House members are allowed to spend on office supplies, franked mail and staff salaries may be about to take a big jump.

The House of Representatives' chief administrative officer asked lawmakers to raise the total pool for member administrative expenses by $90 million, or about 15 percent, according to Roll Call.

The Members' Representational Allowances, as they are known, range from about $1.4 million to $1.7 million for each office. The expense allowance is based on various factors, including the distance of a member's district to D.C. and the cost of office space in their home district.

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House staffers might receive $33 million in benefits, according to a story in Roll Call. The possible increase comes as part of the fiscal year 2010 budget request by Chief Administrative Officer Dan Beard.

At a hearing of the Appropriations Subcommittee on the Legislative Branch Wednesday, Beard pointed out that benefits for House staffers lag behind those of executive branch officials and other legislative agencies, such as the Library of Congress. Among the benefits that stand to be created or enhanced with the new money are tuition reimbursement and child care subsidies.

"So many of our employees are young people just starting out," said Beard. "What we want to do is have a benefits package that convinces employees to stay."

When we first launched LegiStorm in September 2006, we presented users with less than one year of complete congressional staff salary data. Since that time, we have steadily added more recent data but also historical salary data, not to mention other data offerings.

Now we have reached a new milestone. We have entered all historical salary data from House and Senate expenditure books that the Government Printing Office still makes available. As of now, our salary data is complete from October 2000 forward, or eight full years worth.

Today's release includes an additional year of salaries from October 1, 2000 to September 30, 2001 in the Senate, as well as three quarters of House data from October 1, 2000 to June 30, 2001.

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