If you're a senior official in the federal government, you have to fill out what's called

a financial disclosure form.

It's a list of financial interests and investments, things like stocks.

And the goal is to make sure that officials don't have conflicts of interest.

That financial transactions aren't influencing decision making.

So going back for decades since 1978, every government agency has compiled every year a

report on the financial ownership, financial stocks and trades that their top agency officials

have made.

These documents are also supposed to be publicly available, but in most cases they're not online.

And they're actually really hard to find.

Those documents have gone into a stack somewhere in a file case and someone's locked the door

and no one's ever seen them.

And so no one's really ever looked at these documents.

So I thought, wow, if we go look at them, we might find something.

That's our colleague Brody Mullins.

My long time hypothesis as a reporter is the harder it is to find information, the more

likely you're going to find something good.

Also if there's a stack of documents somewhere that no one's looked at in a long time, there's

probably a story there.

It turns out there was a good story there.

And once we got them, we found out that people who worked in the government trade a lot

of stocks and own a lot of stocks in issues that their agencies were in charge of regulating.

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