Oops he did it again! Rangel forgets to disclose assets on ethics form

Already censured once, Democratic congressmen admits he failed to list his wife's small fixed annuity, some IRA distributions and his own board positions

UPDATED 13:10 PM EDT, October 31, 2012 | BY Brad Kalbfeld

Why It Matters:

Lawmakers are required to be transparent about their financial interests. A failure to do so means the electorate can't know that laws are being made in the public's interest rather than in the lawmaker's personal interest.

Nearly two years after he was censured by the House for failing to disclose more than $500,000 in assets, Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., has revealed he forgot to include other required information on his congressional financial disclosure report, including a small annuity owned by his wife and two unpaid board positions he held.

With little fanfare, Rangel earlier this month amended a decade of his congressional ethics reports to include the missing assets.

"Inadvertent omissions were made," Rangel wrote the clerk of the House of Representatives. "My accountant discovered that my spouse had invested in a Fixed Annuity Contract (Fixed Annuity) in 2002." Rangel's letter said his wife Alma's annuity was worth between $15,000 and $50,000 and was held from 2002 to 2010. Income from the annuity ranged from $1,000 to $2,500, he said.

In addition, Rangel disclosed that he had failed to list Individual Retirement Account distributions amounting to about $5,000 in 2011. And Rangel's letter disclosed he had failed to disclose his unpaid memberships on two boards of directors: an ex officio position on the board of the New York City Empowerment Zone and the Ann S. Kheel Charitable trust, which funded "educational, civil rights and other organizations that serve disadvantaged New York neighborhoods."

In December 2010, the House censured Rangel for a variety of infractions, including a failure to list on financiual disclosure statements more than half a million dollars in assets, failure to pay taxes on a property he owned in the Dominican Republic, and raising millions of dollars in contributions for a charity he supported from companies that had business before the House Ways and Means Committee, which he chaired at the time.

Rangel, 82, has served in Congress since 1970 and has been at the center of power for most of his career, influential both in New York's politics and in the budget battles of Washington as a member and frequent chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

In June, he survived a tough Democratic primary in his House district, which has been at the center of New York's black politics in Harlem for decades but which was recently redrawn to include more Hispanics from the Bronx.

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Rep. Charles Rangle

Congress

financial disclosure report

In Plain English:

Financial Disclosure Statements are forms all federal lawmakers are required to file that list their financial assets so the public can know what economic interest they have and can identify conflicts of interest.

A censure is a formal punishment formally voted by the House of Representatives for serious infractions of House rules and ethics. It is a punishment that is rarely used and is reserved for the most serious cases.