Congressman Dan Goldman and Congressman Ritchie Torres File for Investigation of Congressman George Santos With House Committee on Ethics

Read the Full Complaint Here

Washington, D.C. – Congressman Dan Goldman and Congressman Ritchie Torres today filed an official complaint with the House of Representatives Committee on Ethics, requesting an investigation into Congressman Santos for violating the Ethics in Government Act by failing to file timely, accurate, and complete financial disclosure reports as required by law.

“The House of Representatives has an obligation to police itself, and this is just the start of our mission to hold George Santos accountable to his constituents and the American people,” Congressman Dan Goldman said. “George Santos, by his own admittance, is a total fraud. He has admitted that he didn’t graduate college, didn’t work on Wall Street or in private equity, doesn’t own property, and isn’t Jewish — all of which and more he asserted in order to dupe the voters in Queens and Nassau County. But most importantly, there are a number of deeply concerning lies Mr. Santos has told about his finances that have since led to multiple criminal and civil investigations. House GOP leadership views Santos’s disinformation campaign as a running joke, so it is once again left to Democrats to stand up for Santos’ constituents and protect our free and fair elections.”

Congressman Ritchie Torres said, “George Santos has engaged in unethical conduct unbecoming of a Congressman. Even more troubling than the pathological lying, for which he has become infamous, is the likely law-breaking. Santos claims to have earned millions of dollars from the clients he served, yet he failed to disclose the names of those clients, in violation of federal law. The material omissions and misrepresentations on his financial disclosure, as well as the questions surrounding both his personal and campaign finances, are grounds for a House Ethics Investigation.”

Over the past several weeks, extensive public reporting – as well as Congressman Santos’s own admissions – have uncovered a stultifying web of lies that Mr. Santos spun in order to induce voters in his District to vote for him through deception and misrepresentation.

Mr. Santos’s financial disclosure reports in 2020 and 2022 are sparse and perplexing. At a minimum, it is apparent that he did not file timely disclosure reports for his most recent campaign. Moreover, his own public statements have contradicted some information included in the 2022 financial disclosure and confirmed that the 2022 financial disclosure failed to disclose other required information.

Failure to File Timely Reports

Mr. Santos failed to file any financial disclosure report until September 6, 2022 (the “September 2022 Report”). Nor did he seek an extension of his filing deadline. As a result, Mr. Santos failed to file a single financial disclosure report prior to the Republican primary for the NY-03 congressional seat on August 23, 2022, notwithstanding his status as a candidate for 19 months prior.

The Ethics in Government Act requires individuals file a financial disclosure report within thirty days of becoming a candidate or on or before May 15 of that calendar year, whichever is later, and no later than thirty days before any election in which the candidate is participating.

Failure to File Complete and Accurate Reports

Mr. Santos’s violations of the Act don’t end there. The September 2022 Report contains a number of concerning omissions and false statements.

First, the Act requires filers to disclose each financial institution that holds deposits valued at more than $1,000 if the total value of the accounts exceeds $5,000 at the end of the reporting period. In the September 2022 Report, he discloses a checking account balance of more than $100,000 and a savings account balance of more than $1,000,000, but he does not identify the name of either banking institution. Furthermore, Mr. Santos does not disclose any income from either account. For an account of over $1,000,000 million, he would have certainly met the $200 interest income threshold. But Mr. Santos failed to properly report any interest income as required by law.

Second, the September 2022 Report disclosed that he owned an apartment in Rio de Janeiro valued between $500,000 and $1,000,000. Yet in recent media interviews, Mr. Santos – who at one point had claimed that he owned 13 properties – admitted that he did not own any property at all.

Third, Mr. Santos also disclosed that he received “dividends” valued at more than $1,000,000 in both 2021 and 2022. These dividendends were purportedly based on his sole ownership in the Devolder Organization, which he formed in May 2021 after he announced his candidacy for 2022. However, the September 2022 Report describes Devolder as a “capital intro consulting company,” which would not ordinarily have any assets that distribute dividends of any kind, let alone more than $1,000,000.

In any event, according to public reports, the financial data company Dun & Bradstreet estimated that the Devolder Organization only had revenue of $43,688 as of July 30, 2022. Accordingly, Mr. Santos’s disclosure of more than $1,000,000 in “dividends” per year is highly suspect.

Fourth, Mr. Santos recently explained that the sudden “success” of the Devolder Organization stemmed from “multi-million dollar agreements'' with clients or customers. The Ethics in Government Act requires candidate filers who personally performed services for clients “in either of the two preceding calendar years that generated fees for your employer in excess of $5,000” to identify each of those clients.

A recent public report identified several purported clients of Devolder as large Republican donors, which Mr. Santos confirmed. Yet Mr. Santos neither identified any clients for whom he personally performed services nor indicated that he could not report any clients due to confidentiality.

Fifth, Based on the suspicious circumstances of Mr. Santos’s somewhat miraculous and sudden financial success, there are at least two substantial concerns with his omissions and false statements related to Devolder.

Moreover, Devolder was administratively dissolved on September 23, 2022 by the State of Florida because Mr. Santos never filed the required annual statement for the company, raising questions about the company’s status, the ability of Mr. Santos to earn any income from it, and the accuracy of the income he allegedly earned and disclosed. Conveniently, Mr. Santos filed paperwork to reinstate Devolder’s registration on December 20, 2022, after wide-spread reports that Mr. Santos fabricated aspects of his background and employment. But the paperwork sheds no light on the entity’s clients nor how the entity could have paid Mr. Santos a $750,000 salary and more than $1,000,000 in dividends.

Finance disclosure laws are essential to enforce compliance with the law as well as to ensure voters have access to relevant information about candidates. If Mr. Santos’s 2020 and 2022 financial disclosures are to be believed, his salary increased from $55,000 in 2020 to $750,000 in 2021 and 2022, of which he gave a whopping $705,000 to his campaign.

If, in fact, Devolder did not actually generate revenues from providing material services to purported clients, it may have been created as a pass-through entity for donors designed to avoid contribution limits and source restrictions in violation of federal campaign finance law.

On the other hand, if Devolder did generate significant revenues as stated in the September 2022 Report, then Mr. Santos himself may have served as a pass-through for Devolder to donate corporate funds to his campaign, which is also a violation of federal campaign finance law.

Mr. Santos never filed an annual report for the Devolder Organization, which would have revealed some of this information

Given the revelations of Congressman Santos’s pervasive, knowing and intentional misrepresentations about his biography, as well as the public information pertaining to his financial disclosures, Congressmen Goldman and Torres allege that Mr. Santos has failed to uphold the integrity expected of members of the House of Representatives.

Goldman and Torres have therefore requested that the House Committee on Ethics investigate the matter to determine the extent of these violations and take appropriate action as soon as possible.

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