LegiStorm

LegiStorm has posted the latest congressional staff salary data from the U.S. Senate.

The salary data covers the period Oct. 1, 2007 through March 31, 2008. The six-month semester of Senate disbursement data was made available by the Government Printing Office in book form in June and since then we have been busy converting that data into an accurate and structured database form.

This latest addition of staff salary data brings our salaries database to nearly 500,000 individual salary records. We now have Senate data from October 2002 forward and House data from January 2002. We are continuing to grow our database by adding historical data.

LegiStorm has now completed the upload of all personal financial disclosures filed in 2008 for all House and Senate members and aides.

We uploaded the members of the House and Senate the same morning they were released but the staff have been a much bigger chore. We uploaded Senate staff last week and have now just completed the House staff.

All in all, we have 1,727 disclosures from members of Congress, including amendments. We have 4.850 disclosures for aides. All are avaiable to users who register for free.

We plan to expand the historical breadth of our coverage for members of Congress over the coming months so that users can get better context. For example, we have gathered every publicly available filing for senators and they are awaiting our upload. We will let you know when we have those available electronically.

We at LegiStorm were fascinated to read a story in Politico this week which polled the offices of all senators to find out where they got their mortgages, especially by the answer of the former head of the Senate banking committee, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.).

The Politico survey comes after documents reveal that two senators, Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), received preferential treatment on their mortgages from Countrywide after requesting help from the head of the company. So Politico surveyed senators to find out how others received their mortgages. So far, 15 senators have not bothered to answer the poll.

But we were particularly intrigued by the response of Shelby, who headed the Senate Banking, House and Urban Affairs Committee and is still its ranking member. According to Politico, Shelby responded that he has no mortgages on his two homes. In fact, LegiStorm's data indicates that Shelby has a $1-$5 million mortgage with Wells Fargo Bank.

The New York Times values that loan, originally placed with Reilly Mortgage, at $5 million. The mortgage is not on his home but on an apartment complex he owns in Tuscaloosa, Ala. It's not clear whether the mortgage, taken out in 2002 at 6 percent interest, was market rate or not. We will leave that for the experts to determine.

However, our financial disclosure data - covering members and staff alike - can shed some light on this mortgage question. Unfortunately, however, the Congress has exempted the disclosure of mortgages on primary homes, meaning that the vast majority of mortgages go unreported. In light of the brewing scandal over the large mortgage gifts provided to senators, this lack of disclosure would appear to be a glaring oversight.

LegiStorm has now released all Personal Financial Disclosures filed by Senate aides in 2008. The disclosures include the annual reports filed by staffers by the May 15 deadline, as well as letters granting extensions to those staffers who asked for more time to file.

Only certain staffers are required to file disclosures. Generally, those required to file are the highest-paid staffers, who also tend to be the most senior ones who crafting legislation and policy. The disclosures serve as one tool to highlight any possible conflicts of interest or other financial issues involving these key legislative employees.

We have left out a handful of staffers who have filed but who are not listed in our current salary database, such as employees of special commissions. We will be adding them soon.

We have also discovered a bug whereby the staffers are not always listed on the proper senator's page. For example, http://www.legistorm.com/pfd_office/member/Sen_Jim_Webb/819.html shows no staffers filing reports but if you search our site for Legislative Director Michael Sozan, as an example, you do find that Sozan has filed a report here. We hope to fix that bug tomorrow but in the meantime, you should be able to find the financial disclosures by staffer name.

LegiStorm's release of the Senate staffer PFDs comes after we made the disclosures of every Member of Congress available online the same day they were released. Now we are moving on to the larger number of House staffers and we plan to have all of those available within a few days. Our rate is limited mostly by the slow speed of the printers in the House Legislative Resources Center. However, we will post the House financial disclosures as we get them in.

LegiStorm is the only site that has staffers' financial disclosures available online for the public to peruse. As we've said before, we feel these disclosures are vital sources of information. As you look through the disclosures, please leave a comment and let us know if you see anything of interest.

LegiStorm released all of the personal financial disclosures of all members of the U.S. House of Representatives who have filed their reports on time. The Monday morning release follows on the heels of LegiStorm's Friday release of disclosures for all senators.

A list of those members of Congress who have filed for extensions is located at http://www.legistorm.com/2008HouseExtensions.pdf. Some of those who have received extensions have already turned in their reports and we have made those available.

The disclosures came to us from the Clerk of the House in sideways fashion (a result of the fact that the original documents are in landscape orientation, but scanners don't typically take documents in landscape format). LegiStorm likes to make these forms more useful to users by rotating them but because of the rush to get the files up on the web, the rotation of the files will have to wait for a little while.

Financial disclosures for senior congressional staff have also been released by the House and Senate. LegiStorm will have those disclosures up on the web over the next week as soon as we are able to scan them.

UPDATE: All of the house PFDs are now rotated for our users' convenience. As you look through the disclosures, please leave a comment if you find anything of interest