Congress and top Capitol Hill staff have violated the STOCK Act hundreds of times. But the consequences are minimal, inconsistent, and not recorded publicly.

"We were not looking into it. There was just nobody paying attention to it. No one was filing complaints," said Kedric Payne, who was the former deputy chief counsel at the Office of Congressional Ethics around the time that the STOCK Act was passed. Most of the investigations they dealt with between 2012 and 2014 involved campaign-finance issues, Payne said. "When you have the ethics committee, who has failed to go after these blatant violations — it sends a message that anything goes," Payne added. 

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