Public record · STOCK Act enforcement
The 45-day rule is a joke: how Congress files stock trades years late
The STOCK Act says members must disclose a trade within 45 days. One in five filings blows past that line — some by years — and the only penalty is a $200 fine they simply pay.
The scale of it
The record is almost comic. Rep. Richard Allen disclosed a batch of trades on the same August 2023 day — one of them a Costco purchase from April 2017, 2,296 days (six years and three months) after the fact.
The repeat offenders
Who files late as a habit, not an accident
Plenty of members are late once. These file late almost every time — ranked by the share of their trades disclosed past the 45-day line, among members with 20+ buys.
A $200 fine on a trade worth up to $50,000 isn’t a deterrent. It’s a rounding error — and the filings prove members treat it like one.
Late filing is why the “just follow Congress” pitch fails even for the members who trade well. We found that copying the median member loses to the market outright, and that the few who do beat it are often the same people burying their trades for a year. You can’t copy a disclosure you never got.
The fine print
- What “late” means. Days between the transaction date and the disclosure (filing) date, versus the STOCK Act’s 45-day requirement. Both dates are on the public filing.
- Batch filings. The extreme cases are usually one catch-up filing covering years of trades at once — which is itself the violation, at scale.
- Not advice. A read of public House Clerk records, reproducible from the filings.
