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Currents
May 2019
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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 Con-
gress, 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.
Going Too Far?
"There were particular concerns about risks for
those who either travel overseas on government
business or work overseas," says Carol Bonosaro,
president of the Senior Executives Association, who
represents many of those executive branch employ-
ees.
An independent study said there were also risks
of identity theft, which she says the new law helps
avoid.
"What has been eliminated now is the ability of
people to go phishing, if you will," she says.
The White House cited the independent report in
explaining why the president signed the bill. And a
spokesman for Cantor said the House and Senate
were simply following recommendations of the study.
But Lisa Rosenberg, a lobbyist for the Sunlight Foun-
dation, which advocated for the STOCK Act, says
Congress went too far.
"It's really shocking that they used basically the
situation of questions about whether some language
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