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.
Additionally, each release of House books requires extensive data cleanup since names in the original records are often spelled wrong. Even if spelled correctly, different people with the same names require careful sorting out. We do this with extensive research and error-checking algorithms we have developed over the past three years.
LegiStorm will continue to update our orderly and salary database, allowing users to dig deeper into the House data.
LegiStorm is working with the new online format to include the newest salary numbers to our database, and we will be exploring ways to add the full expenses to our data in an easily browsable format. For now, you can look through the expenses in
PDF form.
