How STOCK Act disclosure works

Who files

The STOCK Act is a law from 2012. It says members of Congress must report their stock trades in reports called periodic transaction reports. Members of the House send theirs to the Clerk of the House. Senators send theirs to the Secretary of the Senate, through a website called eFD. Paydirt reads both. The Congress page lists every member with a report in the past 24 months.

What has to be reported

A member has to report a purchase, sale or exchange worth more than $1,000. That covers stocks, bonds, options (the right to buy or sell a stock later at a set price), cryptocurrency and other investments. Funds that hold many investments, like mutual funds and index funds, do not go on these reports. They go on the member's yearly report instead. The House Ethics Committee's memo lists the details.

A member's spouse and dependent children count too. A dependent child is a son or daughter, or a stepchild, who is unmarried, under 21 and living at home, or who counts as a dependent for taxes. When a report says a trade belonged to a spouse or a child, Paydirt shows that.

The law has one narrow exception. A member can leave out something that belongs only to the spouse or child, if the member knows nothing about it, it did not come from the member's money or work, and the member gets no benefit from it.

The 45-day window

A member must report a trade within 30 days of finding out about it, and always within 45 days of the trade. The law sets both limits. The report does not say when the member found out, so Paydirt uses the 45-day limit. A report marked late was filed more than 45 days after the trade. Congressional reports list a date but not a time, so Paydirt counts the gap in calendar days. The late disclosures page lists every late report this year.

What happens when a report is late

A report filed past its deadline is late right away, but a fee comes later. The law sets a $200 fee for a report filed more than 30 days past its due date. That gives the member a 30-day grace period, extra time before any fee. The report still counts as late during that time.

In the House, $200 is the lowest fee. The House Ethics Committee's guide says more than one late report can bring more fees, and its memo says the fee can reach $200 for each trade.

The ethics committees can waive the fee, which means cancel it, but only in extraordinary circumstances, meaning very unusual ones. The reports do not show whether a fee was charged or waived, so Paydirt never says one was paid.

Why the amounts are brackets

Members do not report the exact dollar amount of a trade. They choose a range, called a bracket. The smallest bracket is $1,001 to $15,000. The next ones are $15,001 to $50,000, then $50,001 to $100,000, and so on, all the way up to over $50,000,000.

Paydirt always shows the bracket. Sometimes it needs a single number to do math, for example to add up totals or draw a chart. Then it uses the midpoint of the bracket, the number halfway between the two ends, and labels it derived, which means Paydirt worked it out. The bracket is always shown next to it.

How long disclosure takes

Across the congressional trades on Paydirt from about the past 24 months, the median gap between a trade and its disclosure is 28 days. The median is the middle value: half of the trades took longer than that, and half took less time.

Because of that gap, every return on a Paydirt profile is shown two ways. One starts on the day of the trade, and only the member could have gotten that return. The other starts on the day the report became public, the first day anyone reading it could have acted. Paydirt calls the second one delay-adjusted, and the returns guide explains it.

The median above counts every trade the same, so one member's big report can move it. The disclosure speed page counts another way. It takes the median for each member, then the middle of those for the House and for the Senate. That page is the place to look for how long a typical member takes, and it lists each member's own number. Its numbers can differ a little from the one above, because the counting is different.

Committees and the record

A member's page shows their party, their state, and up to two of the committees they sit on, taken from the public list of committee members. A member's committees are part of the background people use when reading their trades. Paydirt has no data on bills or votes, and it does not claim any link between a committee seat and a trade. Every row links to the original report from the House Clerk or the Senate. All congressional trades are on the Congress feed.