For the first time, the U.S. Senate has given senators, candidates and staff the option of filing their required annual personal financial disclosure statements electronically.

The Ethics Committee’s newly refurbished website allows filers to enter their information electronically rather than submitting paper copies of their reports. That means the public has near-immediate access to the documents. The annual reports, which are due each May 15, have typically been unavailable for 30 days after the deadline while they are scanned and posted on the Senate website. This year, the reports for those who chose to file electronically were available the following day. The change was required by the STOCK Act, which became law in April 2012.

Seventy incumbent senators filed electronically this year; the remainder were about equally split between those who still filed on paper and those who were given extensions of the deadline.

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That’s progress, but other requirements of the STOCK Act that would have allowed for this data to be downloadable in bulk and electronically searchable were reversed by a subsequent Senate bill, S. 716. That means the information made available by the Senate Committee on Ethics lacks basic qualities we’d expect of electronic data.

For years, OpenSecrets.org has painstakingly created an electronic database of personal financial disclosures from PDFs, image files and paper copies of the reports. It’s helpful that the Senate has taken the step of allowing electronic filing. But without the provisions in the original STOCK Act, our task remains the same. We will still download each report individually, and hand-enter each line of data. In doing so, we will create a data set that is accessible, searchable and downloadable.

The requirements of the original STOCK Act affirmed the pervasive view that transparency is a crucial factor in holding government accountable. Unfortunately, real transparency has been elusive; Congress has forestalled it by hiding behind these “electronic” disclosures. We call on lawmakers to restore the original STOCK Act so the public has immediate and meaningful access to these reports.



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