A Wall Street Journal investigative report revealed yesterday that at least 72 hill staffers “traded shares of companies that their bosses help oversee” in 2008 and 2009. While Congress ponders legislation to ban insider trading (which we wrote about in November 2009), WSJ’s Deal Blog points to transparency rules and searchable databases of lawmakers’ financial disclosures as providing a window into whether insider trading has occurred.

In recent years, there’s been progress on making congressional ethics information available online -- most notably with lobbying disclosure reports -- but there’s a long way to go. In January, we called for all congressional ethics information that’s required to be publicly available to be posted online, including the personal financial disclosure reports that were the foundation of the Wall Street Journal’s reporting.

Currently, the Center for Responsive Politics* and Legistorm spend enormous amounts of time and money accessing and digitizing personal financial disclosure forms. We believe that Congress has the responsibility to make this information available to the public on the Internet in a timely fashion and in machine-readable formats. The Sunlight Foundation issued recommendations on changing the House Rules to do that (among other things).

The personal financial disclosure reports themselves deserve a second look. Congress should reexamine who is required to disclose information, what should be disclosed, and how frequently that disclosure should take place.

As things stand, Members of Congress and certain staff are required to disclose stock transactions, but only once a year on June 15. My colleague Paul Blumenthal suggests that real-time reporting would be beneficial and not too burdensome. He’s right, and there’s more to be done.

For example, residences and loans do not need to be disclosed unless they provide income to a lawmaker. That should be changed. Disclosure of residential and loan information would have shed light on the potential conflict of interest raised by mortgage company Countrywide Financial giving allegedly preferential treatment to lawmakers, which created a big brouhaha last year and triggered a year-long ethics committee investigation. These questionable practices could have been nipped in the bud, or entirely deterred, were they required to be reported.

Additionally, lawmaker assets and debts are reported within very wide ranges. Our Executive Director Ellen Miller suggests that assets and debts should be reported to the penny, but even tightening the reporting ranges, as suggested in the Transparency in Government Act (HR 4983), would be a dramatic improvement.

It’s also worthwhile to consider whether using an earnings threshold to trigger staffer reporting is the best way to go. As we’ve seen in other contexts, sometimes staff salaries are set to avoid reporting requirements. It may be necessary to also look at a staffer’s responsibilities to see whether reporting should be triggered.

Finally, although we’re focusing on the congressional context, we shouldn’t forget that financial disclosures are also filed by members of the executive and judicial branch. It may be time to revisit what they must file and how their reports are publicly disclosed. GAO already has a mandate to conduct a review of financial reporting requirements.

There’s a careful balance that must be struck between transparency and privacy, and a weighing of the burden new rules could impose on government versus the benefits that would accrue to the public. As yesterday’s reporting makes clear, there’s a larger role for transparency to play. Placing the personal financial disclosure reports online, with greater detail and increasing frequency, is a great place to start.

• Note: The Sunlight Foundation has provided grants to the Center for Responsive Politics to maintain their money-in-politics resources, including personal financial disclosures.

Thanks to those guys, Jack Abramoff and pals, lawmakers are taking far fewer privately paid trips overseas. Newly enacted ethics rules ban lawmakers from accepting travel gifts from registered lobbyists or organizations that employ one or more registered lobbyist. Congressional Quarterly reports that privately paid travel is off 43 percent from last year.

Legistorm - which tracks congressional travel - has a neat graphic showing the cost of private travel over time:

(Click through for interactivity.)

LegiStorm, the sister company of the for-profit Storming Media, provides information about the U.S. Congress to the public. In line with their goal to make Congress more transparent, they have just launched an earmark database using 2008 data from Taxpayers for Common Sense. Taxpayers' data is currently displayed via a massive Excel spreadsheet. LegiStorm has integrated the data with their other data sets, creating this helpful tool to shine light on congressional and executive spending. LegiStorm says they will add the earmark spending data for 2009 after the budget process is complete.

The site allows you to easily learn earmark details such as who the sponsoring members are, which were sponsored by the president, all the earmarks designated to each state, what organizations received the funds, and what bills authorized each earmark. It also lists the number and dollar amounts each state received (Virginia just edged out Texas and California for the top in earmark dollars), the number and amounts designated by each member, a listing of the most expensive earmarks, top receiving organizations, as well as a list of "airdropped earmarks," an earmark that is not included in the original legislation as approved by either the House or Senate but is later mysteriously inserted into the conference committee reports, which combine both chambers' versions of the bill.

Sunlight is working with Taxpayers to build a site that will allow users to more easily search their earmark data too. And in the meantime congrats to them for completely making their data available to LegiStorm. And thanks, LegiStorm, for making this data more accessible.

In Paul's roundup this morning he mentions several of the reports that came from the release earlier this week of the PFDs  --  personal financial disclosure forms --  filed by House and Senate members that profile their personal financial interests -- stocks, mutual funds, IRA assets and other holdings and liabilities.

Newspapers and other media outlets all across the country have dug into the reports and are highlighting nuggets they've found about the finances of their local congressional delegation. For instance, The Boston Globe found that "six of the 10 House members from Massachusetts are landlords who made thousands of dollars last year on rental properties."  The Washington Post found a clue as to why former Rep. Al Wynn resigned his seat to take a position with a K Street lobbying firm whose "partners on average make slightly more than $1 million a year"...He needs the money.  And then there is Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, who decided apparently that she does not need the money.  The Kansas City Star reports on her walking away from $1 million dollars, having past a deadline last week to pay off the loan she made to her 2004 gubernatorial campaign. As her report indicates, she is one of the more wealthy members of Congress, so much so that she won't likely miss the fortune she's walked away from.  And The Cleveland Plain Dealer's Washington bureau chief, Stephen Koff, got especially creative in his review of the reports.  He was able to get independent professional financial advisers to look at and comment on the reports of each member of Northeast Ohio's congressional delegation. The financial advisors have some interesting advice on what financial strategies the lawmakers have employed in managing their own money. Quite clever.

Unfortunately, the Congress doesn't have to put this information online and so they don't -- at least not in a timely fashion. Where our government fails us, the activist community has come through. LegiStorm has posted on their Web site all the reports of the members of Congress who filed on time.  They will soon post the reports of the senior staff members who earn over a specific salary threshold. Center for Responsive Politics' Personal Financial Disclosure Database is a great site where you can view each report. Bill tells us that Congressional Quarterly provides access to them as well. I also want to remind our readers about Sunlight's newly launched Fortune 535 project allows you to follow the growth or decline of a member of Congress' net worth during their tenure. We haven't updated it with the most recent information yet, but will do so in the coming weeks.