Who Files Late? STOCK Act Deadline Compliance, Ranked
The STOCK Act gives members of Congress up to 45 days to publicly disclose a securities trade. That deadline is the entire transparency mechanism: until the filing lands, nobody outside the member’s office knows the trade happened. So a basic question worth asking of the data is simply, do they file on time?
We measured every disclosed transaction with usable dates in our database, 28,305 of them, comparing each trade’s transaction date to its disclosure date. The answer is a split verdict. The typical disclosure arrives in 25 days, well inside the law’s window. But 7.0% (1,987 transactions) blew past the 45-day deadline, and 1,728 of those were more than 90 days late, double the legal window. Lateness is not evenly distributed: it concentrates heavily in a small group of members who miss the deadline almost every time they trade.
House vs Senate
The two chambers do not behave the same. House members’ disclosures (26,176 transactions) have a median lag of 24 days with 3.9% past the deadline. Senate disclosures (2,129 transactions) run a median of 37 days with 45.0% late. The Senate’s number is heavily driven by a few senators with large, chronically late filings rather than by the chamber as a whole, as the table below makes clear.
The latest filers, ranked
Members with at least 10 dated disclosures, ranked by the share filed past the 45-day deadline. “Median lag” is days from trade to disclosure; the deadline is 45.
| # | Member | Disclosures | Filed late | % late | Median lag |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Michael K. Simpson house · ID | 22 | 22 | 100.0% | 849d |
| 2 | Alan Armstrong senate · OK | 703 | 701 | 99.7% | 113d |
| 3 | Katie Britt senate · AL | 23 | 22 | 95.7% | 271d |
| 4 | Darrell E. Issa house · CA | 20 | 19 | 95.0% | 219d |
| 5 | Tim Walberg house · MI | 16 | 15 | 93.8% | 481d |
| 6 | Stephen F. Lynch house · MA | 13 | 12 | 92.3% | 65d |
| 7 | Thomas H Tuberville senate · AL | 193 | 177 | 91.7% | 817d |
| 8 | Sean Casten house · IL | 12 | 11 | 91.7% | 328d |
| 9 | David P. Joyce house · OH | 14 | 12 | 85.7% | 412d |
| 10 | Austin Scott house · GA | 20 | 17 | 85.0% | 162d |
The table understates how extreme the tail is. As of late August 2026, Senator Tommy Tuberville’s dated disclosures carry a median lag north of two years: trades from 2024 and 2025 surfacing in filings made in August 2026. Several House members in the table have median lags measured in hundreds of days. For those members, the 45-day window is not a deadline being narrowly missed; it is a deadline being ignored.
Why late filing persists
The standard penalty for a late Periodic Transaction Report is a $200 filing fee, frequently waived for first offenses. There is no escalating fine, no routine audit, and no mechanism that forces a correction. The economics are lopsided: for an active portfolio, $200 is a rounding error, and the practical cost of filing months late is close to zero. The disclosure regime works for the members who choose to comply, which, to be fair, is most of them, most of the time.
The delay has a second-order effect on anyone reading the filings: the longer the lag, the staler the information is on arrival. We measured what stocks actually do during that quiet window in What Stocks Do Before Congress Discloses.
Methodology and honest caveats
Lag is disclosure date minus transaction date, both taken verbatim from the government filings. We exclude transactions with lags outside a 0-to-1000-day sanity window: a couple hundred rows carry obvious date typos in the source documents (one filing dates a trade to the year 1814). The member table requires at least 10 dated disclosures. The party-level split, in both the transaction-weighted and member-weighted frames, is in Which Party Files Late?. Figures on this page are computed live from the database and update as new filings arrive.
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Coldpine is a publisher of intelligence on public Congressional disclosures. Filing lags are computed from dates in the public filings and describe disclosure timing only; they are not evidence of wrongdoing by any member. This is informational only, not investment advice, and not a suggestion to buy, sell, or copy anyone’s trades.