wh-financial-disclosures

This project focuses on data collection and analysis of United States Office of Government Ethics (OGE) Public Financial Disclosures (PFDs) submitted via OGE Form 278e.

Background

The Ethics in Government Act of 1978 (5 U.S.C. Appendix, Wikipedia) codified public transparency into the financial interests and employment ties of senior United States Government officials. The United States Office of Government Ethics created OGE Form 278e (XLS, PDF) and OGE Form 278-T to collect required information from filers (User Guide).

For White House and Executive branch officials, individuals can request a copy of the public financial disclosures of a specific named individual using this web form. @stevenrich created a Python script to automate this process.

Resources

Source Files

• U.S. Office of Government Ethics - copies of certain public financial disclosure reports, ethics agreements, and ethics pledge waivers are available while some must be requested via OGE Form 201.
• ProPublica - public Google Drive folder containing released PFDs as PDF files.
• Open Secrets - previously requested PFDs and Ethics Agreement Files for White House officials and Senate-confirmed Cabinet positions.
• The /disclosures directory in this project aggregates actionable PFDs from all sources.

Parsers

• Center for Public Integrity pfd-parser project. NodeJS script used to generate the parsed files posted to data.world.

Parsed Files

• D4D Hack Financial Disclosures dataset on data.world. 9 CSV files mapping the tabular data from the actionable source files.