Financial Disclosure Reports Database | Hacker News Reader

Financial Disclosure Reports Database

clerk.house.gov

34 pointspzxc15 comments

It might be interesting to create an index from this data and compare it to other benchmarks like the S&P 500. I'd call it the HoR 500 and it would be the top 500 publicly traded companies owned by house members. I have a feeling like exploiting non-public information would be irresistible to many of them so maybe this index would outperform the market.

A moderator changed the title from the more descriptive "House of Representatives Personal Finances" to the on-page but less-descriptive title "Financial Disclosure Reports Database", and apparently at the same time hit this submission with a penalty because it immediately dropped from #5 on the front page to #31 on the second page, right below a submission that has the same number of upvotes but is 8 hours old instead of 1 hour old.

So looks like show's over on this one folks -- now that it's on the second page and has some kind of penalty (and a less descriptive title), it's unlikely to get any more upvotes or comments. A shame, I was really looking forward to all the discussion that could happen around this. :(

The post didn't fall in rank because of a title change. Rather, it was flagged by several users, including a moderator, presumably because they felt it was off-topic politics.

Interesting, im guessing this is from the STOCK act? "It would greatly expand financial disclosures and make all of the data searchable so insider trading and conflicts of interest would be easier to detect"[1]

Remember, before this, members were immune to insider trading rules.

Id be curious what the stock returns are since these folks are now no longer immune to insider trading regulations. And considering its merely 'ranges' that need to be disclosed, this makes nailing this down a little harder. Even so this doesn't mean charges would be pressed easily as i'm sure some leeway would still be given as a 'courtesy' to gov't officials.

[1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2013/04/16/177496734...

[2]http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/04/04/fact-s...

I'm a product manager for a site called FindTheBest that actually features this data for both the House and Senate on our Members of Congress topic. We visualize the range figures for each member over the past few years as well as compare them to other members from that state. I get the data from OpenSecrets, which does a pretty good job of liberating the data from those heinous PDFs.

Here's a visual of Charlie Rangel's net worth for instance: http://members-of-congress.findthebest.com/w/frh9TfuVVs1

And a visual of NY congressmembers: http://members-of-congress.findthebest.com/w/8zrc97p8ddr

If you want to check out the topic as a whole you can go to http://members-of-congress.findthebest.com/. I'd welcome any feedback you may have.

> It is unlawful to use the information contained in these Financial Disclosure Statements for (A) any unlawful purpose,

Shocker!

Maybe it means that the crimes "stack." You know, like how robbing someone has penalty A, robbing them with a knife has penalty A+B, and robbing them with a gun has penalty A+C (with C>B)?

Someone find me a lawyer that specializes in recursion!

The format seems to depend on how the representative submits the information. For example, http://clerk.house.gov/public_disc/ptr-pdfs/2014/20000780.pd... should be easy to parse out whereas http://clerk.house.gov/public_disc/ptr-pdfs/2014/8213924.pdf would be harder.

It's odd that there isn't a single spreadsheet with all the data on it, but it probably wouldn't take more than a few days and a few interns to generate that.

Interesting. The guy who used to be my House rep (before some redistricting) has more records in this system than anyone else in my home state (NJ). Not sure if he's more actively investing, or if he's just doing a better job of submitting the right paperwork.

It's interesting to see what kind of stocks he's got, tech and otherwise. On the tech side, he's got some obvious choices (Apple, Google, and Cisco). For non-tech, I see some local NJ companies, and companies with a large presence in NJ.

Sounds like a candidate for Sunlight Foundation API. http://sunlightfoundation.com/api/

Senate version: https://efdsearch.senate.gov/

PDFs? Range values? If I had to guess, I'd say they really don't want us to have this information.

Government work is still incredibly document driven and releasing information in PDFs tends to not only make sense given traditional workflows but also technological sense. We're far away from the days where PDFs threatened to bring your computer and connection to a halt. The range values make sense, as if there were no range values, and someone was found to be even minority off on what their contributions were, they could possibly be liable for that difference in accountability.

Maybe a bit but it also helps avoid people looking for every little trap:

Representative X stated the value of a house was $751k. It appears that Zillow/Trulia/our in house expert appraiser thinks it's $1.5M. Why the discrepancy? Is the appraiser in their pocket? Who is going to prosecute this obvious attempt at circumventing property taxes? More at 11...

Looking at my rep and some others it looks like hard amounts are required for things that are easier to give perfect amounts on i.e. speaking check from X, reimbursement from Y.

Though I agree the format is awful and the scanner looks like it needed a good cleaning. Pure speculation on that front though, these were filled out by a staff, scanned on a cheap office machine, emailed to someone else, manipulated/printed/rescanned and eventually put online.

Though, I'm may be a bit biased towards the mundane after watching the disclosure episode of West Wing last night...

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