Lawmakers’ asset disclosures include a legal way to keep some family wealth out of public view. The wealth of lineal ascendants and descendants who are financially independent can, if the conditions are met, be excluded from the filing. This is ‘nondisclosure.’ The rationale is understandable: requiring disclosure of the wealth of parents who live separately or of grown children can be excessive. The trouble is that the lawmakers using this option are far from few. As of 2025 it is roughly one in two (49.6%, or 140 lawmakers). And on closer inspection, the choice is not randomly distributed. It appears more often among those with larger assets.
What nondisclosure is, and why it is legal
Senior officials must report and disclose not only their own assets but also those of their spouse and of lineal ascendants (parents, grandparents) and descendants (children, grandchildren). The aim is to block roundabout accumulation through relatives’ names. But the Public Service Ethics Act adds a proviso: for lineal relatives who run an independent household, an official may, on request, exclude that family member’s assets from disclosure. This is ‘nondisclosure’ — a privacy safeguard that, on its own terms, makes sense: the private finances of elderly parents living apart or of financially independent adult children should not be laid bare.
So nondisclosure is not unlawful. As long as the conditions are met, it is a permitted, lawful choice. Yet whether it is legal and how much it narrows the purpose of the disclosure system are separate matters. If the point of disclosure is for society to examine how a senior official’s wealth grew, then every family member left out of the filing reduces the information available for that examination. A legal zone of nondisclosure exists inside the disclosure system.
One in two uses it — the 49.6% figure
In 2025, the lawmakers who invoked nondisclosure for at least one lineal relative’s wealth numbered 140, or 49.6% of the total. That is close to half. What began as an exception for privacy has become common enough that ‘exception’ is an awkward word for it. It now looks less like a device used by a few with special circumstances and more like a widely used option inside the Assembly.
More use each year — the window narrows as the system matures
What deserves more attention than where this figure sits is the direction it has moved. It started at 39.2% in 2016, climbed steadily over the decade, and since 2022 has hovered around the halfway mark. The more the disclosure system has been refined and grown familiar year by year, the more fields have remained outside public view. Inside a system honed to raise transparency, the available information has narrowed in some places.
Why does the paradox arise? A system taking root also means that forms, procedures, and the learned know-how of ‘what may be left out, and how far’ accumulate together. A lawfully permitted option gets chosen more often as its use becomes widely known. The gentle upward slope of nondisclosure shows how legal room can harden into custom over time.
Whose wealth is left out — parents and grown children
So whose wealth is left out? Mostly parents and grown children. Mothers (68 cases) are the most common, followed by eldest sons (56 cases) and fathers (50 cases). The breakdown itself does not clash with the system’s rationale: since nondisclosure applies to financially independent lineal relatives, it is natural for parents and adult children to top the list. The issue appears not in the distribution but in its scale.
Most invoke it for one or two people. Yet as many as 16 lawmakers used nondisclosure for three or more family members. One of them excluded six people from the filing at once. In such a case, an asset filing becomes much closer to a document centered only on the officeholder. As a privacy exception expands family by family, the scope of information available for public verification shrinks.
Not ‘how much’ but ‘who’ uses it
Up to this point, one might shrug it off as ‘I suppose everyone does it.’ If half the chamber makes a lawful choice, it is hard to single anyone out. But the question this piece sets out to ask was never ‘how much is withheld.’ The real question is ‘who’ uses it. The same 49.6% means different things depending on who fills that half. Broad, even use is a very different picture from concentrated use by a particular group.
So we split the same data again by net-worth bracket, ranking lawmakers by net worth and comparing the nondisclosure rate of the top bracket against the middle. The result collides head-on with the rationale.
Among lawmakers in the top 20% by net worth, the nondisclosure rate is 75.0%: 1.8 timesthe rate of the middle bracket (about 41%). The more assets lawmakers have, the more often they use nondisclosure. Whatever the system’s rationale of protecting financially independent family members, the assets most in need of scrutiny are also more likely to fall outside the filing’s view. A tool designed in the neutral language of privacy is used more often by those in the highest asset bracket.
The ‘one outlier skewed the average’ objection, and the rebuttal
Here a fair objection arises. Might the top bracket’s 75.0% also be the work of a few extreme cases — like the lawmaker who hid six at once — lifting the average? The smaller the sample in a bracket, the more one or two choices can swing the rate. That is exactly the kind of thing one should be suspicious of when reading statistics.
Plausible, but it does not make the gap vanish. The point is not a single outlier but the direction: the entire top bracket runs 1.8 times above the middle. Strip out one or two cases and the slope, ‘the wealthier, the more often it is used,’ remains. An outlier can exaggerate that slope, but it cannot manufacture a slope that is not there. The question returns, once again, from ‘how much’ to ‘who.’
No party lines — behavior that camps cannot explain
So is this tilt a matter of partisan camp? Reducing it to one party’s morality would make the story simple. But the data blocks that easy conclusion too. In 2025 the Democratic Party (DP) had 67 lawmakers and the People Power Party (PPP) had 66, leaving the two effectively tied. Wealth levels differ by party, but when it comes to the choice to keep family wealth out of disclosure, the two sides move almost together.
This suggests nondisclosure is not the deviance of one camp but a behavior that anyone may respond to similarly once the option is on the table. The tendency that those with stronger incentives to withhold information use it more often operates across party lines. That is why party color alone explains so little.
The problem is not the people, but the rules
So this is not a matter of blaming any one person. If wealthier lawmakers use nondisclosure more often, and there is little partisan divide on top of that, then the problem is not the people but the rules. If anyone, within the bounds of legality, rationally makes the same choice, blaming individuals for the result those choices accumulate is aiming at the wrong target.
If the purpose of the asset disclosure system is for society to watch how senior officials’ wealth has grown, then the present structure, in which available information decreases around the largest fortunes, is itself a signal that it is time to reexamine the permitted scope. This is not a call to abolish nondisclosure. The next question the data points to is how to narrow this paradox: preserving the original aim of privacy while keeping information from disappearing first where the need for scrutiny is greatest.
Why this number matters
Asset disclosure is the smallest unit of the trust a senior official strikes with society. It is one of the few primary documents a voter can lean on to judge a politician. Each family member missing from it narrows the window for catching roundabout accumulation or conflicts of interest, and thins the ground on which voters decide. That half use nondisclosure means that, in half the filings, this verifiability has been lawfully reduced. That is why a single large number should not end in shock but lead to a question about the system.
Unit & source · This tally is a separate count based on the ‘nondisclosure’ item in public officials’ asset disclosures, and is computed on a different basis from this site’s trend (held-assets) data (trend covers asset categories such as real estate and does not carry a nondisclosure flag). Nondisclosure is not illegal — the Public Service Ethics Act permits it for financially independent lineal relatives. Even so, it reduces the information voters can verify. The figures by year, relationship, net-worth bracket, and party are aggregated at the overall and group level, not for any specific lawmaker. Data tally · kookrator.