Financial disclosure filing regulations released by the federal judiciary on Wednesday misinterpret the intent of the groundbreaking 2022 Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act and help explain why it’s taking so long for the judiciary to post judges’ annual reports.

The intended process of posting judges’ and justices’ disclosures online, per CETA, was that a judge would (a) send their report to the Financial Disclosure Office, (b) after which a member of the FDO review staff would review it and, assuming no major errors, (c) an FDO IT staff member would post it in the database within 90 days of the May 15 due date.

But the process described in the regs — which FTC understands has been in place for the last couple of years, despite yesterday’s “new” release — is that a judge (a) files their report, (b) a member of FDO review staff reviews it, (c) FDO staff then sends the FDR back to the judge for a second review, whether or not FDO staff made edits or corrections to it, (d) the judge reviews the report again, (e) the FDO staff reviews it again, and finally (f) a member of FDO IT staff posts it in the database.

This double-review may be why we’ve started to see two electronic signatures on judges’ disclosures (example here).

The process those of us who worked on the CETA bill intended was that 90-plus percent of judges — i.e., those not asking for redactions or extensions — would submit their annual report to the FDO between Jan. 1 and May 15, which would then be posted within 90 days, even if there were typos, as that’s what the amendment process (a few dozen judges each year amend their reports) is for.

But withholding disclosures for months over unnecessary triple-checking (judges and their CPAs double-check the FDRs before submitting them, of course) slows down the posting and is why today, more than a month after the statutory deadline to post all the reports in the database, some 70 percent of the 2024s are still not online, which defeats the whole purpose of CETA.

Old version of the regs (from Sept. 23, 2024; link here and on p. 58)

§540.30 Notification of a Request
(a) The Financial Disclosure Office will notify the filer when a Form AO 10A is received requesting the release of a filer’s financial disclosure report and will provide each filer with a copy of the requester’s Form AO 10A. Except  upon the filer’s written request, the Financial Disclosure Office will not notify the filer of requests to access their reports that are published on the AO’s online database.

New version of the regs (from Sept. 17, 2025; link here and on pp. 51-52; problematic part in bold)

§540.30 Notification of a Request
(a) For financial disclosure reports that are required to be published on the online database (i.e., judges’ reports covering calendar year 2021 to present), AO’s Financial Disclosure staff will notify the judge once a report is certified and afford the judge a final opportunity to request redaction before publication on the database. Publication of a report on the database constitutes its public release since anyone registered on the database can immediately access and download published reports. Judges may choose to receive notifications about who previously accessed their reports on the database.

One more thing:

In the new regulations sections 220.10 (p. 19) and 220.40 (p. 20), both of which describe how judges are to electronically sign their disclosures, have been removed.

The former, 220.10, partially explains where there are so many posting delays: new judges apparently have to print out, sign and mail in a form in order to obtain access to the electronic system that judges are required to use in order to file an FDR. Not great!