house disbursements reports training materials

8/3/2019 House Disbursements Reports Training Materials

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Using House Disbursement Data

Bill Allison & Anu Narayanswamy


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Disbursement data

used to look like this

Published in books 3 volumes Thousands of pages


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In 2009, the House began

putting them online

http://disbursements.house.gov


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as one huge PDF file

Also available broken up into 3 files


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Reports on Member

Representational AllowancesThree components:

Personnel expenses

For staff, including DC and district personnel Official office expenses

Varies by member, includes rent for offices indistrict, travel, equipment, etc.

Franked mailVaries by member


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2011 allowances

Ranges from $1,356,975 to $1,671,596 House average is $1,446,009

Personnel costs capped at $944,671 for eachoffice, top salary is $168,411

Staff, interns, temp employees, employees onleave, etc.

Office expense base is $256,574 Franked mail done by formula based on number

of addresses in a district


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More detail here:

http://bit.ly/crsdisbursement


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Sunlight makes the data

searchable

http://bit.ly/SunExpend


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We use Socrata to publish it


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Lets look at 2011 data

Summary file


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Summary: 10 categories


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which are

Personnel Compensation Personnel benefits

Equipment Other Services Printing and reproduction Rent, communications, utilities Supplies and materials Transportation of things Travel


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Most are self explanatory

Summary gives you the total amount spentper quarter in each category (right handcolumn here) plus year to data (YTD) total


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There is also detailed data

Note that category is retained; other fields arepurpose, payee, recip (orig) and transaction code


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Note on transaction codes

Used to bemany morethan 5 (only 3

of whichappear in 2011data)

They simplifiedtheir system

Means lessdetail


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Some things you

can do with dataFind all the

staff members

Sunlight madea House StaffDirectory (stillbeta)


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Has 2011 data

http://staffers.sunlightfoundation.com/


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Study staff compensation

Do low staffsalaries

contribute to Revolving

door

IncompetentCongress

Reliance on KStreet


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How does your

member stack up?


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Budget stories


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Watch your delegation


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Other things to look at

Are staffers also being paid by campaign?Who are the vendors?Consultants?Look at trends over time

data goes back to 3rd Quarter 2009Compare neighboring districts Franking vs. Travel

Office rent differentials Whos renting them office space


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Lets look at data

and take questions


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Bill [email protected]

Anu [email protected]

house disbursements reports training materials

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