What does OGE Form 278e disclose?

OGE Form 278e is the executive branch's annual, new-entrant and termination financial disclosure. It is a picture of what an official holds rather than what they traded: assets and their income, liabilities, outside positions and agreements, each reported in value ranges rather than exact amounts.

How it works

Two forms carry executive-branch financial disclosure and they answer different questions. The periodic transaction report is filed when a covered official, a spouse or a dependent child trades above the reporting threshold, and it describes events. Form 278e is the Public Financial Disclosure Report and it describes a position — what was held, and what it produced — as of a reporting period.

It is filed on three occasions: on entering a covered position, once a year while in it, and on leaving. A new-entrant filing is the opening balance for that official's public record; the annual filings are the years in between; the termination filing closes it.

The schedules cover assets and the income they generated, liabilities above a threshold, positions held outside the government, and agreements or arrangements — a continuing pension, a leave of absence, a deferred payment from a former employer. Together those are the facts a conflict-of-interest review is built from, which is what the form is for.

Values are brackets. An asset is reported as falling in a range, and income likewise, so a schedule tells you an order of magnitude and a direction and never an exact holding. The brackets also widen as the values rise, so the largest positions are the least precisely described.

The limits are the same three the congressional filings carry. A bracket is not an amount. The filing date is not the date anything happened. And an asset may sit inside a trust or a managed account, so a listed holding is not by itself evidence of a decision by the official who filed it.

Where you see this in the terminal

Executive-branch disclosuresevery official on file, with their filings, transactions and holdings as filed

Every filing on the indexwhat the government's own index lists, held or not, so the gaps stay visible

The transaction reportthe other form — what was traded, rather than what is held

The conventions behind it

What this page explains in plain language, the methodology documents state as conventions: the inputs, what is rejected, and the stated limits.

• The executive periodic transaction report
• The congressional equivalent
• How we read disclosure filings

Sources

• The Ethics in Government Act of 1978, as amended by the STOCK Act.
• OGE Form 278e (Public Financial Disclosure Report) and its instructions.
• The U.S. Office of Government Ethics public disclosure index.

All public records — see the data sources page.

More of these: every concept page. The full transparency index is at Methodology.