PFD Methodology
How Signal8 reads, normalizes, and displays Personal Financial Disclosures filed by members of Congress.
Reading the brackets
By statute (Ethics in Government Act, 5 U.S.C. App. §102), members report holdings and transactions in value brackets rather than exact dollar amounts. A holding shown as $1,001 – $15,000 can be anywhere inside that range.
The largest published bracket is $50,000,001 +. When you see the + badge it means the upper bound is open-ended and the true value could be substantially higher. Midpoint estimates on Signal8 cards are arithmetic midpoints of the bracket and are estimates only; actual values cannot be inferred from PFD data alone.
EIGA exclusions
PFDs do not cover several common asset classes. Net worth shown on Signal8 is therefore a disclosed-asset figure, not a complete personal balance sheet:
- Personal residence (unless rented out for income)
- Deposit accounts with balances under $1,000
- Federal retirement plans (Thrift Savings Plan, FERS, CSRS)
- Social Security and Veterans benefits
- A spouse's separate non-marital property held prior to marriage
Amendments
Members may amend a previously-filed PFD. Signal8 trusts the upstream extraction pipeline's amendment resolution: for every (politician, year) tuple we display the latest non-superseded filing. Superseded filings remain visible in the filings timeline with an Amended badge so the audit trail is preserved.
Sourcing & attribution
PFDs are public record. Primary sources are the U.S. House Clerk (House members) and the U.S. Senate Office of Public Records (Senators). Signal8 mirrors the public PDFs and surfaces the normalized data extracted by our upstream pipeline.
We gratefully acknowledge OpenSecrets / Center for Responsive Politics for pioneering the public-record financial-disclosure ecosystem that makes consumer-friendly PFD display possible.
Have a correction? PFDs are filed by individual members; the authoritative source is the original PDF linked from each filing row. Email [email protected] for any data-quality reports on the Signal8 representation.
Disclaimer
All bracket midpoints, sector aggregates, and net-worth ranges on Signal8 are estimates derived from publicly-filed brackets. They are not a substitute for reading the underlying PDF. Brackets are wide by law; treat any single-figure summary with appropriate skepticism.