MapLight has launched its personal financial disclosures database, a new tool that brings to light the fiscal relationships shared between legislators and private companies.
Each year, members of Congress file ‘personal financial disclosures’ regarding their various assets and sources of income. In these documents, legislators provide detailed lists of their investments in anything from real estate to mutual funds and company stock.
MapLight has compiled and organized this information into a single dataset searchable by politician, company, year, or Congressional session, with results categorized by income type (dividends, capital gains, etc.) and personal or spousal ownership. This data is made freely available to the public through a simple web interface and may also be downloaded as a CSV spreadsheet for deeper scrutiny.
Below is a MapLight analysis of the 2013 personal financial disclosures of members of the 113th Congress to identify the ‘top 15’ most popular company stock holdings and total amounts held*. The 113th Congress was composed of 53 Democrats, 2 Independents, and 45 Republicans in the Senate and 234 Republicans and 201 Democrats in the House of Representatives. The 114th Congress, which convenes on January 3, 2015, will be comprised of 53 Republicans, 44 Democrats, 2 Independents, and one race TBD in the Senate and 244 Republicans, 186 Democrats, and 5 races TBD in the House.
* Exact amounts are usually unknown; personal financial disclosure forms provide a fixed range of values with which to record the amount of an asset held.
See below table for U.S. Congresspersons’ AAPL ownership. Lawmakers are not required to disclose the exact value of the assets they hold, but rather are required to list a minimum and maximum value for each asset. The “Minimum Value” and “Maximum Value” columns reflect these disclosures.
Source: MapLight.org
[Attribution: Fortune. Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]