STOCK Act Late Filing Tracker
GovGreed Research · InvestigationThe $200 Fine — our working paper on STOCK Act compliance: 12.1% of disclosures filed late, the penalty is a $200 fee, prosecutions are zero. Read it →
12,559 congressional stock trades — 12.1% of all deduplicated filings — were submitted after the 45-day legal deadline. The penalty: $200. Prosecutions: zero.
Get alerted when any politician files a STOCK Act trade more than 45 days late.
Disclosure-gap detection runs daily across all 540 Congress members. Free account: alerts on the worst 10 offenders. Founders: every politician, every late filing, real-time.
Worst Offenders
The table below shows the 25 members of Congress with the most STOCK Act late filings, ranked by total late count. Data is sourced from GovGreed's database of 103,887 deduplicated STOCK Act disclosures, cross-referenced with the politicians table for party and state information.
The $200 Fine Problem
The STOCK Act's enforcement mechanism is widely regarded as toothless. When a member of Congress files a trade disclosure late — even months or years late — the maximum statutory penalty is $200. The fine can be waived entirely for first offenses at the discretion of the Ethics Committee.
$200 fine. $50 million trade. A member of Congress can execute a multimillion-dollar stock trade, file the disclosure two years late, and face a penalty that amounts to 0.0004% of a $50,000,000 position. The fine is not a deterrent — it is a rounding error.
Multiple reform proposals have sought to increase penalties, mandate blind trusts, or ban congressional stock trading outright — and in July 2026 the House passed the Stop Insider Trading Act, 232–198, which would bar members, spouses, and dependent children from buying new stocks. The Senate has not acted on it; a separate bipartisan Senate bill cleared committee. Until one is signed, the $200 fine remains the only enforcement mechanism.
Trends Over Time
Has STOCK Act compliance improved since the law was enacted in 2012? GovGreed tracks year-over-year late filing rates and average disclosure gaps to measure whether congressional transparency is getting better or worse.
Key finding: Late filing rates have remained stubbornly consistent at 10–15% year over year, despite increased public scrutiny following the COVID-era trading controversies of 2020–2021 involving Senators Burr, Loeffler, and Feinstein. Public awareness has not translated into improved compliance.
Frequently Asked Questions
Not financial advice. All data sourced from public federal disclosures: STOCK Act filings via QuiverQuant and FMP APIs. GovGreed provides data and transparency — it does not make investment recommendations or legal accusations. Statistics current as of April 2026.