The STOCK Act, in plain English: $200 fine, 45-day rule, zero prosecutions.

What the law actually requires

The STOCK Act in five bullet points:

1. Insider-trading prohibition. Members of Congress, congressional staff, and certain executive-branch employees may not trade securities on the basis of material non-public information obtained through their official duties. This was technically already true under pre-existing securities law; the STOCK Act removed any ambiguity that Congress was covered.
2. Periodic Transaction Report (PTR) disclosure. Any individual purchase, sale, or exchange of a security worth over $1,000 must be reported within 30 days of the trade or 45 days of when the member became aware of it — whichever is later. Spouse and dependent transactions count.
3. Annual Financial Disclosure. Members file an annual report listing all assets, income, gifts, and liabilities. Senate-confirmed executive officials file an OGE Form 278e.
4. Searchable public database. The original 2012 law required all of this to be published in a free, searchable, downloadable, sortable online database. This provision was repealed in 2013.
5. Negotiating disclosure for staff. Senior congressional staff have to disclose if they are negotiating future private-sector employment.

Penalties for late PTR filing are administrative — a $200 fee per late report, applied at the discretion of the House or Senate Ethics Committee, and routinely waived. There is no specific criminal penalty for filing late, only for the underlying insider trading itself (which is governed by 18 U.S.C. § 1348 and carries up to 25 years in prison). That underlying statute has never resulted in a criminal conviction of a sitting member of Congress.

Timeline — the law, the gut, and the aftermath

Named violators: who got caught and what happened

The STOCK Act has produced ethics letters, late-filing fees, and one closed DOJ investigation per major news cycle. It has produced zero convictions. Below: the most-cited cases.

The 2013 amendment — how Congress quietly killed the database

This is the part of the STOCK Act story that almost nobody outside the Brennan Center / NPR / Cornell Law universe knows. We are going to spell it out.

The 2012 law required that all financial disclosures of members of Congress AND of approximately 28,000 senior congressional staff be published in a free, searchable, downloadable, sortable online database. The database was supposed to launch in spring 2013.

It did not launch. In late March 2013, the National Academy of Public Administration released a study commissioned by Congress raising security and privacy concerns about publishing staff financial information in a fully searchable format. The study cited identity theft, stalking risk, and (notably) the use of staff financial data by lobbyists or foreign intelligence services to identify pressure points.

The fix Congress passed: instead of redesigning the database (encryption, opt-out, two-factor access), they removed the staff disclosures from the public-database requirement entirely. The bill, S.716, was a single page. It passed the Senate by unanimous consent on April 11, 2013 — meaning no senator objected, no roll call was held, no floor speeches were made. The House passed it the next day by voice vote. President Obama signed it into law two days later.

"It's an outrage. The act they passed last year was supposed to bring real transparency to financial disclosures. Now they've taken away the only enforcement mechanism that would have made it work." — Anthony Romero, executive director ACLU, on the 2013 amendment (NPR, "How Congress Quietly Overhauled Its Insider-Trading Law")

The effect of S.716 was not just to remove staff disclosures. The political message was that Congress had not, in 12 months of operating under the STOCK Act, found the public-database mandate workable. The administrative infrastructure to police the law — which was always supposed to be the database — was never built.

Why no member has ever been prosecuted

Three reasons.

1. The "material non-public information" standard is hard to prove. A member of Congress sees a classified briefing on Tuesday and trades a related stock on Friday — that is suspicious, not illegal. Prosecutors need to prove the member used non-public information from the briefing as a material basis for the trade. Without an email or recording of the member explicitly connecting the two, the inference is rebuttable.

2. Speech or Debate Clause immunity. Article I, Section 6 of the Constitution protects members of Congress from being questioned about legislative acts in any other forum. That makes investigation of why a member voted or wrote a particular bill very hard, which makes proving the trade was based on legislative information even harder.

3. The enforcement bodies are constrained. The House Ethics Committee and Senate Ethics Committee are evenly split between the two parties; investigations stall on tied votes. The DOJ reports to the President. The SEC has limited jurisdiction over Congress (it polices market intermediaries, not the trading parties). The Office of Congressional Ethics has no subpoena power.

Combined, these three factors mean the STOCK Act is functionally a disclosure regime, not an enforcement regime. The disclosure is the punishment. Which is exactly why the 2013 amendment killing the public-database requirement matters so much.

What we built to fill the gap

GovGreed is what the 2012 STOCK Act's public-database provision was supposed to be. We index every disclosed congressional trade (House Clerk PTRs + Senate eFD), every executive-branch 278-T (OGE), every roll-call vote, every committee assignment, every FEC contribution, every Senate LDA lobbying filing, and every USASpending federal contract — into a unified queryable graph. Then we score each trade against five conflict layers: trade activity, late-filing rate, committee–trade alignment, donor–trade alignment, and bills voted YES on while holding affected stock. The result is a 0–100 conflict score per member.

The data is free. The API is free. The score is sortable. There are 23,426 trades in our database that were filed past the legal STOCK Act deadline. We flag every one of them.

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