Congress gets 45 days to disclose trades while corporate insiders get 2

This is where the congressional trading rules start looking ridiculous.

Corporate insiders have 2 business days to report a trade.

They disclose the exact shares, exact price and resulting holdings.

Congressional officials generally have up to 45 days after the trade, or 30 days after receiving notice, whichever comes first.

And they don’t have to give you the exact price.

They can report:

$1,001 to $15,000

or

$1 million to $5 million.

You can know that a senator bought Apple.

You may not know exactly when, exactly how much, or exactly what price they paid until much later.

The numbers make the difference even harder to explain.

One analysis of more than 565,000 corporate insider transactions found a median reporting lag of about 2 calendar days.

For more than 14,000 congressional transactions, the median lag was around 27 days.

And roughly 6.4% of congressional transactions were reported late.

The penalty for being late?

$200.

That’s not much of a deterrent when you’re talking about trades worth hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.

And Congress knows there’s a problem.

The House passed H.R. 7008 by 232 to 198 on July 22, which would ban members from buying individual stocks while in office.

But it still isn’t law.

The Senate hasn’t finished it.

So here we are.

The people writing the rules that move markets can trade individual stocks.

They can disclose those trades weeks later.

They can report broad dollar ranges instead of exact amounts.

And if they miss the deadline, the standard penalty is basically pocket change.

Meanwhile, corporate executives with access to inside information have two business days to tell everyone exactly what they traded.

I’m not saying every congressional trade is corrupt.

I’m saying the system is built with a pretty obvious double standard.

If Congress really wants the public to trust its trading, why not give lawmakers the same disclosure standard they gave corporate insiders?

Two business days.

Exact shares.

Exact price.

No ranges.

No 45-day window.

That would solve a lot of the argument pretty quickly.