We’re happy to bring you the updated Personal Financial Disclosure section of our website!

It may seem surprising that 2012 data on the personal finances of lawmakers, the Supreme Court and the executive branch is considered new in January 2014. But processing these disclosures and getting the information they contain into a searchable database is not for the faint of heart. Let us explain.

Every year on May 15, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices and high-ranking members of the executive branch are required to file a form detailing their personal finances for the previous year. Filers who are not ready can request an extension, which gives them up to an extra three months to file. That means the public — including the Center for Responsive Politics — can’t even begin to look at the filings until between five and eight months after the end of the calendar year covered.

Reports can be submitted electronically, though that’s not required. An electronic filing requirement was originally included as part of the STOCK Act, but the provision was removed in the subsequent S. 716, which passed in May 2013. Though electronically submitted forms are much easier to read than the handwritten ones, even then the forms are only available as PDFs and are not searchable. And we don’t currently have the capability to pull information from handwritten filings through OCR (optical character recognition). We hope to soon!

In order to provide searchable data to visitors of our website, including CRP-added industry codes, we must hand-enter each item from each page of the forms. Every asset, transaction, income amount, trip, gift and position held is keyed in by a real person. Needless to say, this takes a long time.

Some filers submit blurry, handwritten reports. Others hand in hundreds of pages of brokerage statements. And some submit amended reports with little or no information connecting the amendment to the original report.

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Beyond that, financial data can be confusing. Sometimes the value of an entire portfolio is listed along with the values of each underlying asset, which can lead to overreporting if the duplications aren’t caught. Another common challenge we encounter is accurately coding an asset as a bank account or a stock invested in a banking institution.

All of these issues require special care and make creating the PFD dataset a time-consuming process.

We’ve done our very best to provide accurate, searchable and downloadable information. Please let us know what interesting things you are able to do with the database and alert us to any mistakes you think we might have made along the way.

Thanks, and happy hunting!



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