About

Government officials in California, elected and appointed, have to submit a Form 700 to the Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) every year. It is a general financial disclosure form that includes property, investments, and gifts.

The FPPC has a web tool to search the disclosures in their database, but its clunky and only allows one search at a time. And even once you have the documents, the data is still locked away in the PDF.

It would be better to have a machine readable data set of the Form 700 data.

So that's what we're doing: turning the disclosure forms into JSON so that we can more easily answer questions like "which legislators own stock in Tesla?" and "how many legislators don't file their paperwork on time?"

This is a two step process:

  1. Scrape the PDFs off of the FPPC's website. This is a headache.
  2. Go through each document and manually create a JSON version of it.

For the most part, this website is related to step 2. It's a tool to create structured data out of each disclosure form. But the website has a robot side kick that occasionally checks for new forms and adds them to the system. And if you feel like manually uploading a disclosure form the robot missed, you can do that here.

Using the data

You can get JSON of all of the database using the forms.json endpoint. If you notice any issues with it, we'd appreciate it if you could just go ahead and fix it using the URL structure /form/:id, save it, and then it will be fixed for everybody!

About CalMatters

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You can learn more about the organization and read our journalism on CalMatters.org.