What members of Congress hold, from their annual reports.

Methodology

Sources

House reports come from the Office of the Clerk (disclosures-clerk.house.gov): the yearly financial-disclosure index lists every annual report and amendment, and each is a PDF. Senate reports come from the Senate Office of Public Records’ electronic financial disclosure site (efdsearch.senate.gov). Holdings are the assets section of each report: Schedule A on the House form, Part 3 on the Senate form. Coverage starts with reports for 2016. Candidates’ reports are left out, and so are executive-branch reports.

Which report counts

Members file one annual report per calendar year, due May 15 of the next year, with extensions of up to 90 days. They can amend it. For each member and year, Palanor uses the latest electronically filed report or amendment. A year is shown as complete once its filing season has closed in mid-August; until then it is marked as still being filed.

Scanned reports

Only electronically filed reports are read and published: 5,460 so far. 860 reports filed on paper since 2016 are scanned images. They are counted but not read, because machine reading of scanned disclosure forms did not meet the accuracy bar Palanor set for publishing without a person checking every row. Members who file on paper are therefore missing from the totals for those years.

Ranges, not amounts

The law asks for value ranges ($1,001–$15,000, $15,001–$50,000 and so on), and each holding is shown with the range as filed. Where Palanor adds holdings up, it uses the midpoint of each range and labels it “range midpoint”: an estimate from the filed ranges, never an amount anyone reported. Open-ended ranges (“Over $50,000,000”, or a spouse’s asset “Over $1,000,000”) count at their floor. An asset reported with no value at year end (“None”), usually one sold during the year and listed for the income it earned first, is shown on the member’s page but not counted as a holding. Palanor does not add up a member’s holdings or rank members by them.

Companies

A holding is tied to a company when the filer wrote a ticker that matches a listed company whose name agrees with the filed asset, or when the asset name matches exactly one company’s name. Otherwise it is shown as filed, without a ticker. The 2016 House form has no asset-type codes, so there a holding counts as a company’s stock only when the filer wrote its ticker. Company counts cover shares and options of S&P 500 companies only; funds, bonds and private companies are left out. A member counts once per company, whether the member, a spouse or a dependent child holds it. Sectors are Palanor’s company sectors, and S&P 500 membership is today’s list, applied to every year.

What is not shown

Reports also list the accounts that hold each asset, the locations of property and descriptions written by the filer. Palanor does not store or show those details, and debts owed to a filer appear without the debtor’s name. Qualified blind trusts are not itemized on the reports, and assets that meet the spouse exemption are left off by the filer.

Legal basis

The Ethics in Government Act makes these reports public and bars using them for a commercial purpose other than by news and communications media for dissemination to the general public (5 U.S.C. §13107(c)). Palanor publishes them here as news dissemination, with a link to every source report.