Sunlight's Methodology

A brief overview of financial disclosure

The Ethics in Government Act of 1978 requires each member of Congress to file an annual report with the Clerk of the House or the Secretary of the Senate disclosing certain personal financial information to allow constituents to determine whether their lawmakers have conflicts of interest.

Lawmakers report the value of their assets, liabilities and their income in broad ranges–between 0 and $1,000, $1,001 and $15,000, $15,001 and $50,000 and so on, all the way up to the top two ranges of $25,000,001 to $50 million and more than $50 million. They are not required to list everything they own–their residences, including second homes, need not be disclosed. However, members must disclose stocks, bonds, mutual funds, money market funds, savings accounts, trusts and real estate held for investment; they must disclose the date and price range (again, these are wide ranges) when they sell or purchase assets; they must disclose income from interest, dividends, distributions from partnerships; they must disclose their debts over $10,000 with the exception of mortgages on residences or loans secured by cars or furniture. Like assets, debts are reported within the same wide ranges as assets and transactions.

Lawmakers filed the first financial disclosure forms in 1979, covering calendar year 1978. The original forms disclosed assets on a range that peaked at “more than $250,000.” Every asset worth more than that amount, whether it was worth $250,001 or $250 million, fell into that top category. Since then, Congress amended the asset ranges on personal financial disclosure forms several times, most recently in 1995. That year and every year since, the top range has been more than $50 million.

Our net worth calculations

Sunlight used the disclosure reports from 1995 for all members of Congress, except, of course, for those lawmakers who were first elected after that year. For them, we used their first congressional financial disclosure form. We entered each asset, liability and the low and high range given for both. We then determined the ranges of assets and indebtedness reported on his or her disclosure form. We, thus, came up with two numbers–a maximum estimate and a minimum estimate, based on the different high and low numbers the lawmakers reported. (Of course, we subtracted from the high and low asset figures the low and high liability ranges.)

In other words, if a lawmaker reported one asset worth between $50,001 and $100,000, and one debt of between $15,001 and $50,000, his/her assets would be either

$100,00 - $15,001 = $84,999

OR

$50,001 - $50,000 = $1

Our colleagues at the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) calculate the net worth of lawmakers in the same way. For the 2006 net numbers, we used CRP’s numbers. We also followed CRP’s methodology in averaging the high and low range numbers to arrive at an average net worth for each lawmaker. In the example above,

($84,999 + $1) / 2 = $42,500

Of course, this average number potentially has as little relationship to a lawmaker’s actual net worth as either the high or low number–the disclosure system is so flawed that one can't tell whether a member of Congress is a multimillionaire or in debt to the tune of millions of dollars. For example, in 2006, Rep. Vern Buchanan’s average net worth was $191,695,634, according CRP’s calculations. This number was averaged from high and low ranges of $407,911,974 and negative $24,520,706. Other lawmakers have similarly abnormally wide variations in the ranges reported for their assets and liabilities. We stress that we are offering only estimates for all lawmakers, even for those who do not have such wide variations. There is no way–it is impossible, given the state of congressional personal financial disclosure practices–to calculate the precise net worth of lawmakers.

How we determined the net worth for U.S. families

The data for the average net worth for American households is from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) studies released triennially by the Federal Reserve Board. The SCF began studying household wealth (net worth) in 1989. While similar studies have been conducted by other organizations for years prior to 1989, the most consistent and widely cited study is the SCF. We provide SCF figures for 1995 and 2004.

Please note that the SCF figures include residences as a household’s asset, while lawmakers’ personal disclosure reports do not.

Disclaimers

For freshmen lawmakers elected in 2006, we used the first personal financial disclosure report they filed in 2006 while candidates for office as well as the first financial disclosure form filed in 2007.

A few lawmakers’ personal financial disclosure reports were difficult to obtain or decipher. Specifically, a copy of Rep. Ciro Rodriguez’s 2005 candidate filing was not available from CRP or through the Clerk’s office. As Rodriguez ran for office in 2004 prior to winning election in 2006, we used his 2004 candidate filing. Additionally, for Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, we used her 1999 financial disclosure form because it appears that she did not disclose her assets from 1995-1998. Several requests to her office to provide the disclosure reports were unsuccessful.

Rep. Edwin Perlmutter filed a report as a candidate for 2005, which was illegible. Therefore, we cannot calculate a first year value for Perlmutter. Sunlight requested a legible copy of the 2005 report to his office, which has yet to respond to our request. Additionally, though he filed a form in 1995, we were forced to use Sen. Gordon Smith’s 1996 disclosure report because his 1995 form was illegible. Sunlight’s requests to his office for a clearer copy of the 1995 form have yet to receive a response.

There are rare instances when a lawmaker includes an attachment to their personal financial disclosure report that provides more details about the values of their assets. These attachments typically detail the value of smaller assets within a trust that contains various holdings. When reporting on the assets for lawmakers who include attachments, we calculated their assets based on the dollar amounts listed in the attachment, except in cases where the lawmaker checked an asset value box on the personal financial disclosure form for the overarching asset containing the smaller assets. Thus, if a lawmaker entered a family trust as having a value range of $1,000,001-$5,000,000 and included an attachment that described that trust in more detail, the value range of $1,000,001-$5,000,000 was used. However, if no asset value range was selected, then the values listed in the attachment were used.

Additional data

As a public service, Sunlight is also providing, for longer serving members of Congress, a copy of their first available personal financial disclosure form in PDF format. The Clerk of the House of Representatives and the Secretary of the Senate destroy disclosure reports after six years, but the General Printing Office (GPO) collected and printed, in book form, the disclosure reports filed by every member of the House from the inception of the Ethics in Government Act in 1978. Sunlight photocopied each lawmaker’s first filed report from these books.

Sadly, the GPO does not publish the personal financial disclosures of reports filed by members of the Senate. Luckily, there are a limited number of senators whose records are affected by this lack of preservation. Only 38 of the 100 members of the Senate were elected to office after 1995, when CRP began collecting personal financial disclosure reports. However, 35 members of the Senate served in the House of Representatives prior to joining the upper chamber, meaning that their first filings were published by GPO. That still leaves 27 senators whose pre-1995 disclosures cannot be retrieved. For them, the earliest available disclosure form is the 1995 report preserved by CRP.