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.
The Associated Press quoted LegiStorm founder Jock Friedly to show the possible positive effect of adding transparency to the legislative expenses.
"There's no question about it that any time you make records more accessible it's much harder to get away with abuses," said Friedly. "A little bit of embarrassment will go a long way to fixing some of the problems."
Previously, the expense reports have only been released as printed volumes, running to thousands of pages covered in small type each quarter. The volumes are now made available to the public in basement offices House and Senate office buildings.
Until now, LegiStorm's database of congressional salaries was the only online source for any of this data. But the salaries in our database represent only a fraction of the total disbursements made by Congress. The full disbursements also include everything from taxi cab fares to television purchases and rent payments. Members of Congress are required to spend taxpayer funds only on official business and not to pay for personal expenses.
LegiStorm hopes to add the full expense records to our database once the House and Senate post the information online.
