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Internal Operating Brief — Congressional Wealth Project
The one-page-per-piece map of what exists, why it exists, and what it's worth. For orientation of any new collaborator (human or agent). 2026-07-18.

Mission
Determine, for every member of the U.S. House, whether their wealth grew in ways that office alone cannot explain — and deliver that answer to the voters of their own district. Not a national outrage list; a local accountability instrument, district by district.

Operating principles (these decide arguments)
Bad data is worse than missing data. Every number must survive audit; anything uncertain is flagged, ranged, or excluded — never silently shown.
Deterministic first. Machine-generated documents are parsed with geometry and code; AI models are reserved for scans and handwriting, and only behind measured benchmarks.
Human judgment is ground truth. Corrections and verifications are never overwritten by machines, and every verified report becomes test data that future parser changes must beat.
Spend is metered. All model usage runs through cost guardrails with preflight estimates and hard ceilings; vendor spend requires owner approval. (The entire corpus reprocessing in July 2026 cost ~$42.)
One source of truth per topic. Routing: PARSING-STRATEGY.md. Accuracy: ACCURACY-REPORT.md. Launch: PRE-LAUNCH-CHECKLIST.md. Roadmap: ENRICHMENT-ANALYTICS-AND-DISTRIBUTION-PLAN.md.
The pieces
1. Ingestion + parsing (the foundation) — WORKING
Downloads and parses every House annual financial disclosure, 2007–2024: 4,300+ documents across five document generations, including the scanned and handwritten 2007–2012 archive that exists in structured form nowhere else. Per-form pipelines: Form 4 (modern) via a deterministic coordinate parser (no AI, free, ~5 minutes for the whole corpus); Form 3 (old scans) via benchmarked vision extraction; Forms 1/2 via OCR-table extraction; Senate eFD via HTML. ~170K asset records with values, ownership codes (self/spouse/joint/dependent-child), and page-level provenance. Value: the moat. Everyone else's congressional data starts where the digital era starts; ours reaches back through the paper era, normalized.

2. Accuracy machinery (the credibility engine) — WORKING
Every parse passes invariant gates (impossible values, column confusion, attachment gaps, ordering violations → review queue, never silent trust). Golden corpora of human-verified reports gate every parser or model change. Cross-year anomaly detection catches value misalignments. Wealth years still under review are excluded from headline calculations and publicly footnoted. Value: this is what makes the project publishable. One debunked claim in one district would poison all 435; the machinery exists so that never happens.

3. Review tooling (the human-leverage layer) — WORKING
Admin panel with: anchor-assisted review (a verified year audits its neighbors — divergences, new/missing assets, one-click corrections, saved progress), one-click row edits, page-level PDF jump, verification that instantly recalculates the member's wealth. Attachment-style filings (wealth hidden in appendices) are flagged for human resolution by policy. Value: collapses thousands of row-audits into hundreds; converts owner review time into permanent test data.

4. Wealth analytics (the product brain) — WGS live; rest planned
Live: per-member wealth snapshots (with honest min/max ranges) and the Wealth Growth Score (growth minus reported income). Planned (approved plan, phased for agent execution): excess growth (growth beyond what the market explains — the headline metric), cohort percentiles, an opacity score (filers who make auditing hard are themselves a signal), per-owner breakdowns (assets parked with spouses/children), historical trading extraction from Schedule B, committee-jurisdiction overlap, live PTR tracking for freshness. Value: converts "who is rich" into "whose wealth is unexplained" — the difference between a leaderboard and an accountability instrument.

5. Distribution (the point of it all) — designed, not yet built
District Report Cards (every claim linked to its source PDF page), 435 SEO landing pages (via the separate website-builder project), press kits for local newsrooms, and eventually geo-targeted amplification — hard-gated behind election-law counsel. Triggered by events (new filings), not a constant national drumbeat. Value: "your congressman got rich in office" delivered to his own voters is a different category of thing from a national corruption list.

Current status (one line each)
Data: all form types on final pipelines; corpus reparsed; wealth recalced.
Launch gate: owner hand-audit + attachment resolutions in progress (PRE-LAUNCH-CHECKLIST.md).
Roadmap: ENRICHMENT-ANALYTICS plan approved; executor-agent ready; reviewer gates at every phase.

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Internal Operating Doc