Financial Disclosure Tidbits
Originally posted in April 2023 but updated in Aug. 2024:
All federal judges and justices are required to file annual financial disclosure reports. That’s well known.
1. But did you know that judges are able to obtain up to a $1,370 reimbursement (Sept. 2023 edit: $1,685) “for the preparation of financial disclosure reports” — i.e., a reimbursement for fees they’d pay to a CPA, financial adviser or firm for assistance in filling out their FDRs (see pp. 21-22)? That reimbursement was approved by the Judicial Conference on Oct. 1, 2001 (was $1,000). It was raised in 2019 and again in 2023.
2. Did you know that one of the preparers has advised judges on what types of information they might want redacted from their reports, and that this advice is overly broad, to the point where, if heeded by those in charge of redactions, the disclosures’ accountability purposed would be greatly diminished?
Read the redacting advice from 2019 here.
3. Did you know that the judiciary sends judges and justices very detailed instructions for how to fill out their disclosures each year, and these instructions, it would seem, would make it very difficult for, say, 150 judges to “forget” about financial conflicts in more than 1,000 cases from 2010 to 2018, as the Wall Street Journal reported in 2021-22, or a justice to omit their real estate transactions, as reported by ProPublica in 2023?
Read the 2010 instructions (for the 2009 disclosures) here.
Read the 2021 instructions (for the 2020 disclosures) here.
Read the 2024 instructions (for the 2023 disclosures), which include the “personal hospitality” update, here.
4. Did you know that under a subsection of the Ethics in Government Act judges and justices can be fined $50,000 for “knowingly and willfully falsif[ying…] any information that such individual is required to report” on their annual disclosure?
5. Did you know there is no public list detailing how many judges and justices have been fined under the law?
We believe that number to be zero, which is ridiculous given the sheer number of judges who file disclosures each year (we estimate the total number of judicial disclosures filed since the Ethics in Government Act passed to be around 100,000), the types of random and untoward (and often omitted) gifts judicial officers have received, and the fact that a judge who was impeached and removed was cited by the House for omissions on his disclosure (namely, a free hunting trip).