Database screenshot of Insider's "Conflicted Congress" database
Search the personal financial records of members of Congress using Insider's exclusive databaseInsider
  • Insider has published exclusive databases from members of Congress' personal financial disclosures.
  • The searchable, sortable information goes far beyond what Congress itself provides the public.
  • Use the data to spot potential conflicts between lawmakers' responsibilities and personal finances.
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Insider has compiled and analyzed hundreds of US House and Senate financial disclosures to create a searchable, sortable, and near-complete accounting of members of Congress' personal finances. 

The databases — one for the Senate and one for the House — include members of Congress' individual assets, stock transactions, debts, and other outside income. They are the most complete and detailed public accounting of the individual finances of federal lawmakers.

Insider's "Conflicted Congress" investigation used this data to reveal how members of the US House and Senate often disregard their own ethical regulations, which are designed to combat corruption and curb conflicts of interest. 

Some have done this by violating federal conflicts-of-interest laws. Others have invested in the same industries they're tasked with regulating. Still more have bought and sold stock in healthcare companies — most notably COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers — at times when they were making life-and-death decisions about federal pandemic policy. 

You can now use the data to scrutinize members of Congress' finances yourself. 

Search by keyword to look for specific stocks, businesses, or banks. Find out who received gifts valued at many thousands of dollars. Learn which lawmakers earn huge paydays by writing books. Filter by income type to see the most popular ways members accrue their wealth. You can sort the data by name, state, and asset value, among other values.

Both databases are organized into tabs that reflect sections of the original financial-disclosure documents, which members of Congress filed using either electronic forms or on paper — in a few cases, handwritten.

Each tab details different financial categories for members of Congress. These include assets, unearned income, transactions, and liabilities. Select individual tabs to see all entries for that specific financial category. You can further search within, filter, or sort each tab to narrow your results.

Methodology 

Insider compiled the congressional personal financial databases using publicly available annual financial disclosures filed by each member of Congress. Members of Congress submitted these disclosures during the course of several months beginning in the spring of 2021. The documents generally detail their personal finances for calendar year 2020. Insider did not include any financial disclosures or amendments submitted after November 12, 2021. 

The disclosures were most often submitted as non-machine-readable PDFs or, in more than 40 instances, handwritten. Where possible, Insider converted the PDFs into comma-separated value format. But in dozens of cases, the disclosures required manual data entry. When an entry was not fully legible, Insider marked the data with question marks or as "illegible." 

Insider's database does not generally include certain financial information lawmakers aren't required by law to report, such as the value of their personal residences, value of their personal vehicles, and retirement accounts from their service as elected officials. It also does not include four members of Congress whose disclosures were uniquely complicated and lengthy, comprising hundreds of pages of handwritten or scanned documents: Reps. Ro Khanna of California, Vicente Gonzalez of Texas, Kurt Schrader of Oregon, and Harold Rogers of Kentucky.

Once Insider's data entry was complete, a team of fact-checkers further reviewed and verified each entry in the data for accuracy. 

Read the original article on Business Insider