Members of Congress keep struggling to comply with a decade-old financial disclosure and transparency law — the latest, two federal lawmakers who were late reporting stock and U.S. Treasury transactions.
For the third time in 14 months, Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) missed a 45-day disclosure deadline imposed by the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act.
Carper was as much as two weeks late in reporting his spouse’s U.S. Treasury bill purchases and sales totaling up to $345,000, as well as a PayPal stock sale up to $15,000, according to a June 30 federal financial report reviewed by Raw Story. The STOCK Act only requires legislators to disclose their own, their spouse’s and dependent children’s transactions in broad ranges.
“There was a clerical error,” Natasha Dabrowski, Carper’s communications director, told Raw Story. “Senator Carper is working with the Ethics Committee so he can fully resolve the matter.”
The STOCK Act — passed in 2012 to stop insider trading, curb conflicts-of-interest and enhance transparency — requires prompt reporting of most purchases, sales and exchanges of stocks, bonds, commodity futures and cryptocurrency by key government officials, particularly members of Congress.
Raw Story reported in March that Carper was more than a year late in disclosing his wife Martha Ann Stacy’s $2,991.98 sale of stock in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Ltd. Carper, as chairman of the Senate Finance Subcommittee on International Trade, advocated for Taiwan's inclusion in the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. Carper's team also indicated a "simple clerical error" at that time.
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Carper was also months late in disclosing Stacy’s $1,124 sale of stock in international mining company, Barrick Gold Corp., in November 2021, Insider reported last year.
“Senator Carper and his wife, Martha, have always been careful to ensure that their financial investments are handled separately by a financial advisor who makes decisions and transactions independently,” Dabrowski said. “Senator Carper supported the STOCK Act, and he fully supports ongoing conversations in Congress on how to strengthen the legislation and improve transparency and accountability for our elected officials.”
Carper announced in May that he will not seek reelection for fifth term, marking an end to his nearly 50-year career in politics, The Washington Post reported.
Raw Story’s review of congressional financial disclosures also indicates that Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI) was more than a year late in reporting two purchases of U.S. Treasury Series I savings bonds totaling up to $30,000, according to a June 27 federal financial disclosure.
Grothman’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The standard fine for violating the STOCK Act is $200, but the House Committee on Ethics and Senate Select Committee on Ethics have historically waived the fees for many violators.
“If you had a higher penalty, I think it would get the attention of lawmakers a lot quicker,” Kedric Payne, vice president, general counsel and senior director of ethics at nonpartisan government watchdog organization, Campaign Legal Center, told Raw Story last month.
“That $200 penalty is from the 1970s. If you change that to just adjust it for inflation, I think then you'll start to get people's attention.”
In a recent interview with Raw Story, one of the STOCK Act’s original authors, former Rep. Brian Baird (D-WA), blasted Congress for its continued excuses for failing to abide by the law.
“I mean, come on. ‘The dog ate my homework,’ aren’t we a little more grown up than that?” Baird said. “If we're capable of voting on whether or not to raise or lower taxes or send people to war, I think we can report when we make an investment.”
Epidemic of violations
Dozens of members of Congress have failed to comply with the STOCK Act. During the 117th Congress from 2021 to 2022, at least 78 members of Congress — Democrats and Republicans alike — were found to have violated the STOCK Act's disclosure provisions, according to a tally maintained by Insider.
Raw Story has this year identified at least 16 members of the 118th Congress who have broken the federal conflicts of interest law, including the new addition of Grothman.
The ongoing violations come at a time when a bipartisan group of lawmakers have introduced several similar bills aimed at banning congressional stock trading.
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The most recent bill to be introduced this session — the Bipartisan Restoring Faith in Government Act — is co-sponsored in part by political rivals in Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL).
Other materially similar bills include the Ending Trading and Holdings in Congressional Stocks (ETHICS) Act, the TRUST in Congress Act and the Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments (PELOSI) Act.
In the decade since the STOCK Act’s passage, the push for a total ban on lawmakers trading stocks while in office gained but then lost momentum last year when the Democratic-led House, then led by Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, decided not to conduct a hearing on any of the stock-ban bills and never brought it to the House floor for a vote.
News organizations including the New York Times, Insider, NPR and Sludge have documented rampant financial conflicts of interests among dozens of members of Congress, such as those who bought and sold defense contractor stock while occupying positions on congressional armed services committees or otherwise voting on measures to send such companies billions of federal dollars. The executive and judicial branches are riddled with similar financial conflict issues, too, as the Wall Street Journal has reported.
The Wall Street Journal won a 2023 Pulitzer Prize for its investigation into financial conflicts among officials who work in federal agencies while Insider won the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sunshine Award for its reporting on congressional financial conflicts.
