The STOCK Act has one job: make members of Congress tell the public what they're trading, and do it within 45 days of the transaction. It is not a complex law. Katie Britt, Republican senator from Alabama and frequent presence on the family-values speaking circuit, has filed 13 of her last 14 required disclosures past that deadline. The average delay is 145 days. Three times the legal window. The single worst filing in the dataset cleared 243 days late. That's not a staffer dropping the ball once. That's a compliance posture. The filings are public, the deadlines are statutory, and the math is not close. At some point the charitable reading runs out.
The Clock the Law Set
The STOCK Act passed in 2012 with the specific intent of closing the window between a transaction and its public disclosure. Forty-five days. That's the rule. Congress set it. Congress voted on it. Senators who were in the chamber at the time voted yes.
Forty-five days is long enough to take a long vacation, negotiate a car purchase, and forget you meant to call your dentist. It is not an onerous deadline. It is the floor the law set for basic transparency, and it is the floor Britt has cleared on exactly one of 14 filings in the window we examined.
One. Out of fourteen.
The Numbers, Because the Numbers Are the Story
The late rate is 92.9%. The average delay past the legal deadline is 145 days. The worst single filing came in 243 days after the 45-day clock expired, meaning the underlying transaction sat undisclosed for the better part of a year past when the law required it to be public.
To put 243 days in context: a Senate term is six years. Two hundred and forty-three days is about 11% of a full term. You could run an entire presidential primary campaign in the time it took that filing to surface.
The STOCK Act imposes a $200 fine for late filings. Two hundred dollars. On a senator drawing $174,000 in annual salary, trading assets that presumably justify the paperwork, the fine is less than a parking ticket in a major city. Members are required to disclose. They are not required to divest, recuse, abstain, blush, or look up from their phones. And the penalty for blowing past the deadline is so small it doesn't register as a deterrent. It registers as a line item.
What a Pattern Looks Like
One late filing is a scheduling problem. Two is a workflow issue. Thirteen out of fourteen is a decision, conscious or otherwise, about how seriously the office takes the disclosure regime.
The pattern here isn't a rogue quarter or a chaotic stretch around a recess. It's the baseline. Over the window covered by this dataset, Britt's office filed late at a 92.9% clip with an average overage of 145 days. That's not variance. That's the setting the operation runs on.
The STOCK Act disclosure system exists precisely because Congress decided, after years of embarrassing headlines about members trading in sectors they regulate, that sunlight was the minimum ask. Not divestment. Not blind trusts, in most cases. Sunlight. Tell the public what you bought and sold, and do it before five months have elapsed.
A 145-day average delay makes the sunlight part optional in practice.
The Britt Brand, Briefly
Britt ran in 2022 as a straight-arrow reformer. She was 40 when she won, the youngest woman ever elected to the Senate, and she leaned hard into a persona built around accountability and Christian conservative values. She gave the Republican response to Biden's State of the Union in 2024, a performance that generated its own news cycle for reasons that had nothing to do with financial disclosures.
The accountability pitch and the 92.9% late-disclosure rate are just sitting there in the same public record, not arguing with each other, not reconciling, just coexisting.
Her office has not explained the pattern publicly. There's no statement in the record addressing the streak. The filings eventually arrived. They were just 145 days late on average when they did.
What the Law Can and Can't Do
Here's the institutional deadpan: the STOCK Act has no escalating penalty structure. File late once, you owe $200. File late thirteen times, you owe $200 per late filing, which is $2,600 total, which is roughly what Britt's office spends on printer cartridges in a slow month. There's no license suspension. There's no public censure triggered by a streak. The Ethics Committee can act, but historically the Ethics Committee treats financial disclosure violations the way the rest of us treat terms-of-service agreements: technically binding, not really enforced.
The law also doesn't specify what transactions the late filings covered, how material the trades were, or whether anything in the gap period happened to overlap with committee work. That's a separate analysis. The late-filing streak is the lead, not the coda.
What the public record shows is that a sitting U.S. senator, on a committee schedule that touches legislation affecting every sector her portfolio might touch, has spent the last disclosure window filing required paperwork an average of 145 days after the law said it was due. The receipts are public. Make of them what you make of them.