That's right. If you want to look up the financial disclosure forms filed by high-level congressional staffers — say, to find out whether they've been
using the privileges of their positions to make well-timed stock trades — you have to come to this office.
Holman showed me how it works. You have to enter your name and address into a computer, and then you can search. But you have to know the name of the
person you are searching for. If he or she has filed a financial disclosure form, it will come up as a PDF, which you can print at a cost of 10 cents
a page.
"The database itself is almost meaningless," says Holman. He says the only option for those who want to get a comprehensive look at what some 2,900
staffers have filed is to review the cases one by one. "And that's just too big a job for anybody to do."
The STOCK Act was supposed to make this task significantly easier. Records for members of Congress, the executive branch and their staffs were
supposed to be posted online in a searchable, sortable and downloadable format.
If you wanted to see who traded health care stock just before a committee acted on a health care bill, it would be easy. No trips to the basement
required.
But there were concerns, especially among the 28,000 executive branch staff who would be required to post their financial disclosures online.
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always has to be the first one to the party, three more days to go
yet!