LegiStorm: Transparency's Sidekick

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband lost between $100,001 and $1 million on an investment in American International Group according to her 2009 personal financial disclosure.

The revelation was the main focus of a number of news stories published after LegiStorm announced we had posted the disclosures for members of the House yesterday, two days before the schedule release.

The Washington Post, USA Today, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal were among the outlets that looked at the files on LegiStorm and wrote about what they found.

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The difficulty in accessing records of lawmakers' spending and a general lack of transparency in those records was the subject of a Wall Street Journal article today.

The article was a follow up to Saturday's WSJ report examining official spending by Congress, including representatives that purchased digital cameras and televisions using their official expense allowances. The purchases were legal as long as they were used for official congressional business.

The latest article highlighted the difficulty in finding documenation of such expenditures. The House and Senate both publish members' expenditures in dense volumes of printed pages rather than making them easily accessible online. To get access to the records, you have to go the record rooms of the House and Senate, which are both located in basements of congressional office buildings.

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Local news media outlets across the country have taken an interest in congressional staff bonuses, using salary data provided by LegiStorm.

The stories - in places like Wisconsin, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah - follow up on a Wall Street Journal article earlier this month that reported that House members handed out the highest seasonal bonuses in years to their own employees in 2008. The scrutiny of congressional staff bonus practices comes as members of Congress have railed against CEOs who paid hefty bonuses with taxpayer bailout money. 

For example, the Salt Lake Tribune reports that former Utah Rep. Chris Cannon (R) handed out bonues equivalent to a 50 percent pay raise for some of his staffers after losing his district's Republican primary. According to the Tribune, Cannon "wanted to thank his staffers for the work they had done and entice them to stay until he left office in January. But his primary motivation was helping them get bigger salaries in their next jobs."

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The Wall Street Journal has reviewed the annual practice of lawmakers rewarding staff with annual bonuses - and this past year they appeared to do so in record numbers, according to the LegiStorm data that the Journal cited.

Bonuses are not unusual on Capitol Hill. But 2008 seems to have been an unusually big year for bonuses, according to the most recent House data LegiStorm analyzed. Each year, personnel compensation rises in the fourth quarter in the House of Representatives (data for the Senate is not yet available and is not as easily broken down). But in 2008, average pay per House employee spiked the most in the eight years since we have begun tracking salary data.

The Journal found that House bonuses ranged as high as $14,000. The New York Post also ran a more focused story this week about Rep. Vito Fossela's (R-N.Y.) generosity with bonuses as he served out a scandal-ridden last few months in office.

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Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.)'s personal financial disclosures show she has owned stock in OneUnited Bank and her husband has been a director there, but that hasn't stopped her from using her official position to go to bat for the company in several instances.

The Wall Street Journal broke the story about her actions and her self-reported stake in the company exceeding $250,000.

If the House ethics committee decides to investigate the matter, Waters could find herself trying to explain why she didn't recuse herself from the matter.

The Wall Street Journal ($$) has a story in today's edition highlighting the importance of personal financial disclosures for members and their staff.

Russell Caso, a former chief of staff to Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), admitted his wife received payments from a group with ties to the Russian government but he did not report the payments on his personal financial disclosure as required, according to The Journal's anonymous sources with knowledge of court documents. Caso pleaded guilty to not disclosing the payments in December, but the origin of the funds wasn't known until now. The sources identified International Exchange Group as the source of a $19,000 payment for "editing work." The WSJ quotes a speech by Weldon in which he said the company had ties to senior Russian military, intelligence and political officials.

Caso's undisclosed payments are part of a larger corruption probe looking at Weldon, as well as a Justice Department inquiry into companies with Russian ties who are suspected of trying to gain improper influence in Washington.

The case points out yet again the usefulness of the personal financial disclosures of congressional staffers that we published in February to a surprising amount of controversy. The disclosures give a needed look at possible conflicts-of-interest by powerful staffers and members of Congress when everything is reported correctly. But often, the most interesting things about disclosures are what is left out.