May 15, 2025
As incoming agency heads and political appointees continue to file their nominee and new entrant reports public financial disclosure reports, today, thousands of other senior leaders are due to file annual reports. These disclosures are vital to identifying and preventing conflicts of interest, ensuring government decisions are made in the public interest.
While we might hear a lot about the contents of these reports, what we don’t hear is the story of innovation, efficiency, and cost-savings about how those disclosures are filed. It is the story of a system that has saved thousands of hours of time and millions of taxpayer dollars, slashing electronic filing costs from more than $10 million in 2015 to just over $4 million in 2024. It is a story about reducing the average cost per filer from $415 in 2015 to $146 in 2024, a 65% savings. The story began ten years ago, in January 2015, when OGE launched Integrity, the electronic public financial disclosure filing and review system.
Before Integrity, the annual filing season began with senior government officials stocking up on pens and correction fluid, before sitting down with the paper form or a static electronic form and, in many cases, stacks upon stacks of continuation pages to transcribe bank statements, mortgage documents, and brokerage holdings. This all changed in 2015, when the Integrity system brought relief. Filers could now use a modern smart form to file their public financial disclosure reports that prompts them to file more accurately and completely. No more squinting at tiny instruction blocks or guessing where to report a stock holding. Better, they could start each year’s report with the information from previous filings which increases accuracy and reduces the burden of filing for these senior officials.
The story was much the same for ethics officials reviewing these reports. Before Integrity, the review process would begin with a flood of forms in mail rooms and inboxes across the government. These forms arrived by every imaginable conveyance; certified mail, telefax, email attachments, and some just slipped under the office door; tracked with a menagerie of spreadsheets, checklists, and paper ledgers. Reviewing them unleashed a torrent of sticky notes, red pens, and emails as ethics officials manually worked through each entry. Integrity brought huge efficiencies to these government reviewers as well. They could now see at a glance who is in the process of filing, who hasn’t started, and who has already filed. They could start their reviews of annual reports with an automatic comparison to the previous filing, saving time previously wasted on manual line-by-line comparisons. Communicating with filers is done within the system and ethics officials identify conflicts of interest faster, reducing risk to agencies. The resulting reports are clear and easier to read for the public.
So, when you see a news article about a public financial disclosure report, know that a seamless electronic filing system, maintained by a tiny group of dedicated OGE employees and used by every nominee and nearly every annual filer in the executive branch, helped get that report more accurately and efficiently filed, reviewed, and certified. It did so with minimum government time and money. And, it continues to deliver clearer, more efficient, and accurate reports for the American people.