While the Senate struggles to pass a bill that would require them to file their campaign finance reports electronically, one office in the House of Representatives is having serious disclosure problems of their own. The office of Rep. Bill Sali consistently files campaign finance disclosures and personal financial disclosures late, with dozens of amendments and corrections. The reason: they don’t know how to use computers. From the Politico:

One complaint? When the office files reports to Congress, they need to be amended. According to the Idaho Press-Tribune, the office has “filed 41 amendments to its required finance reports since 2005.”

And Sali’s office files late, apparently. One of two congressmen to do so. “Like 13 days late was the last one,” snitched a spy (and a newspaper, too). “And they chalked it up to computer problems.”

See here for the actual statement sent to the FCC: “I am unable to file the 2nd quarter 2008 FEC report, as FEC technical support is still attempting to fix the Sali for Congress data file. I first attempted to upload a file to the FEC site on June 6. I again tried on June 9, using the new FEC software update, without success. I then sent FEC technical support a copy of the Sali for Congress FEC file. FEC technical support is still attempting to fix the file so that it may be uploaded. I am in regular contact with FEC technical support and the FEC analyst, in an effort to resolve this matter.”

Sali’s problems with computers are so acute that the Idaho Press-Statesman ran an entire editorial on his epic disclosure fail.

U.S. Rep. Bill Sali needs to get his house in order. This has nothing to do with how he votes in the House of Representatives, but how the basic everyday operations run in his office.

…

The real bottom line is that it is important to file reports on time and accurately — it’s not a joke.

Disclosure is not a joke. Rep. Sali should take public disclosure more seriously and perhaps figure out a way to train his staff on computer use.

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As required by the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, the Clerk of the House launched an online database for current personal financical disclosures. The site only hosts PDF copies of these reports and is only searchable by member, not by anything they list on the reports. (I also had difficulty loading the PDF in the most recent version of Adobe Acrobat.) Kudos to the House for moving towards much greater transparency!

If you want to see how this information can be displayed in a more user-friendly and compelling way, check out the Open Secrets Financial Disclosure database.

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Michael Stern at Point of Order, one of the better blogs for legal issues in Congress, covers the legal background of the charges brought against Sen. Ted Stevens. Stevens is facing seven felony charges for deliberately filing false financial disclosure forms to the Senate Ethics Committee. Give Stern’s explanation a read; it’ll be worth it when following the Stevens trial. Steven’s trial starts on September 24.

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The Hill highlights a problem that we’ve seen far too often with personal financial disclosures. Lawmakers do not always follow the rules in properly filling out these important disclosure forms. More often than not, the public is not privy to the lack of disclosure because oversight is spotty at best. Sometimes it takes an unfortunate story to point out what is lacking from a financial disclosure form:

Rep. Laura Richardson (D-Calif.) could face fines for leaving a heavily indebted mortgage off her financial disclosure statement, according to campaign finance experts.

A review of Richardson’s 2007 financial disclosure shows that she failed to report her Sacramento home mortgage as a liability even though she owed $40,000 more than she paid for the home, which was purchased in January of that year. By the end of 2007, Richardson had accumulated $575,000 in total debt after failing to make payments on her original $535,000 mortgage, according to Sacramento County records.

Financial disclosure laws require members of Congress to report home mortgages as liabilities if indebtedness exceeds the purchase prices of the item.

Normally, lawmakers are not required to list their personal homes or the mortgages they carry on that house. Richardson’s case, emblematic of a larger trend in contemporary American society, is different.

Personal financial disclosure forms are some of the most unreliable disclosure documents filed in Congress. Assets and liabilities are listed in value ranges, not exact numbers; information is left off, sometimes vitally important; sections are filled out incorrectly. Congress needs to reevaluate personal financial disclosure forms for future years with accuracy and transparency as fundamental values in crafting new forms. This should start with the oversight bodies, the Ethics Committees, who can provide leadership to the support bodies of the Clerk of the House and the Secretary of the Senate.

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Just as members of Congress are filing their latest annual personal disclosure reports (due this Thursday), we are launching "Fortune 535," a new Web site which lets you track how much, or how little, lawmakers’ wealth has grown during the past 11 years — the period of time from which lawmakers’ personal financial data is available.

For the first time ever, we compiled and visualized online lawmakers’ net worth from personal financial disclosure filings to show the growth in net worth for each member of Congress from 1995 to 2006. These filings reveal lawmakers’ personal finances-assets, liabilities, outside income-and the gifts and travel provided for them by outside organizations. Fortune 535 also lets you compare the net worth growth of each lawmaker to that of the average American family, and lists the wealthiest lawmakers (Rep. Jane Harman, Rep. Darrell Issa and Sen. John Kerry), those with the greatest change in their net worth, those who began their congressional careers with no net worth and those whose net worth was less than $0 in 2006. Sen. Clinton, for example, started her Senate career with over $6 million in debt, but is now worth over $30 million.

One thing we learned while working on this project: measuring lawmakers’ net worth is very difficult (and sometimes impossible) because of the seriously flawed disclosure system used by members of Congress. Because the personal financial disclosure reports lawmakers file asks for assets and liabilities in ranges, we could not determine whether some lawmakers, like Speaker Pelosi, are extremely wealthy or on the verge of declaring bankruptcy (or somewhere in between). That’s why we support more precise reporting requirements as well as full online disclosure and preservation of lawmakers’ personal financial disclosure reports.

"Fortune 535" relies on the personal financial disclosure database at OpenSecrets.org and archive, but since that data only dates back to 1995, we dug through the archives of the Library of Congress Law Library to retrieve personal financial reports (required by law since 1978), that were previously only available on paper. We made available PDFs of these first personal financial disclosure reports filed by lawmakers, as part of Sunlight’s goal to make more government information publicly accessible on the Internet.

For each of the 535 members of Congress, there are 535 individual stories told through stock portfolios, rental houses, mortgages, student loans and ownership of stock in multi-million dollar corporations. The data we reveal should certainly raise questions for citizens and journalists to ask about the rising and declining fortunes of their elected officials.

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