Full disclosure: Qatar, not DC

By Jennifer Peebles | Monday, October 6th, 2008

Here’s an addendum to our story from last week concerning the Houston City Council’s personal financial disclosure forms.

Councilman M.J. Khan’s 2007 trip on behalf of the U.S. State Department wasn’t to Washington, D.C., as we had said. The councilman left us a voicemail to say that the trip instead was one he had taken for the State Department to the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar.

“They have put me on their speakers list, and they send me around the world, especially to Muslim countries, to talk about issues regarding the life of American Muslims,” said Khan, who has served as president of the Pakistani-American Association of Greater Houston.

Aside from correcting the destination of Khan’s trip, this addendum also points out a serious flaw in the forms themselves: While they require trips to be disclosed if they were paid for by someone else, they don’t require disclosure of the destination of the trips, their purposes or the dates on which they were taken. There’s no specific place on the form for those details, a fact that makes it harder for the public to thoroughly vet officials’ comings and goings — and harder to jog a public official’s memory, too.

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(Photo: Buildings in Qatar by flickr user M.Lubinski. Used via the Creative Commons license.)