Government Officials and Their Stocks - The Journal. - WSJ Podcasts

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Brody Mullins: Those documents have gone or stacked somewhere in a file case and someone's locked the door and no one's ever seen them. And so no one's really ever looked at these documents. So I thought, "Wow, if we go look at them, we might find something."Brody Mullins: My long time hypothesis as a reporter is the harder it is to find information, the more likely it is you're going to find something good.

Brody Mullins: They're still allowed to, but they changed the law somewhat. They banned insider trading on Capitol Hill. Ryan Knutson: The reporters had to file hundreds of records requests across dozens of agencies. Eventually they got their hands on more than 31,000 financial disclosure forms for about 12,000 officials spanning from 2016 to 2021. I asked Rebecca Ballhouse, one of the reporters on the team, about what these documents are exactly.

Ryan Knutson: Once they got these documents, Rebecca, Brody, and their colleagues started analyzing them to look for patterns and they found thousands of potential conflicts. Ryan Knutson: It held more than 50 officials at five agencies, including the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department reported trading stock in companies not long before their departments announced enforcement actions. And at the Environmental Protection Agency...

Rebecca Ballhouse: I think there are a couple of reasons. I mean, first of all, you want to have faith that government officials, especially this very wide set of officials that we're talking about who influence all kinds of different policies, you want to feel like those people are acting in the country's best interests, that they're not thinking about their personal finances, that they're thinking about what is best for Americans.

Rebecca Ballhouse: The way it works is that officials file these disclosures every year and every month if they're trading. And then ethics reviewers need to go through every form and sign off that it complies with the law. Rebecca Ballhouse: The reviewer is not going to be in a position where they can kind of enforce that or know that to begin with.

Rebecca Ballhouse: A lot of them said, "I discussed these with ethics officials and they said it was fine."

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