Personal finance, public information
You no longer have to go through filing cabinets to see Congress members' financial disclosures.
When you move on to the Financial Disclosures section of LegiStorm, it’s pretty interesting to see how much information is public domain. You can find out spouse employment, outside compensation and prior employment, among other things.
Become a member!
If you really want to get into the nitty-gritty and be able to look at PDFs of Congress members’ tax statements and other documents, all you have to do is create a username and password. The database is searchable by name, state and office. You can also look at financial disclosures by category, including Earned Income, Campaign Work and Agreements.
Is anything sacred?
Despite the outcry from Congress members who have called the LegiStorm creator a “peeping tom” among other colorful names, the site does go to certain lengths to protect privacy. On documents that contain social security numbers, bank account numbers, home addresses or phone numbers, those are redacted. The site also leaves out names of minors.
Also, personal loans taken while the person was not in office are not public information, so those aren’t included. Mortgages and home values are also excluded.
Foreign gifts
The next section of the site is Foreign Gifts. I already shared some of the more colorful gifts in Part 3. If you like reading about the strange things political leaders give each other as presents, you could spend hours in this section.
However, it’s illegal for Congress members to keep many of these gifts. Diplomatic protocol generally requires that politicians accept foreign gifts, but if the gift is worth more than $335, the recipients must turn them over to their agencies.
The only question I could not find the answer to was where the gifts go after they are turned over to the agencies. The site says they are transferred to the “General Services Administration,” but where do all the pricey decorative boxes go?
According to Congresspeople and their (incredibly well paid, I might add) staffers, LegiStorm does give out too much info about what gets spent on. That said, I don’t think that they really have a lot of defense against what public dollars go towards. If they spend on something with any funds (legally obtained, that is) that don’t come from tax revenue, then it’s fair enough. But not wanting us to know what they spend our money on, especially if they’re going on “fact finding missions” to vacation destinations when they have a job to do…we deserve to know.