Disproving claim Florida Sen. Rick Scott disclosed $26M in stock trades 'over a year late'

In August 2025, the X account Unusual Whales posted a claim that U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, a Florida Republican, had disclosed more than $26 million in stock transactions "more than a year late." Such a delayed disclosure would be a violation of federal law, which requires all members of Congress (and some people surrounding them) to disclose any trade of assets worth more than $1,000 within 30 days. The claim spread across social media, and Snopes readers searched the site looking for more information about the supposed delayed disclosures.

However, we found that the claim was false, for several reasons. We contacted Unusual Whales and Scott as part of our reporting for this story. Scott's communications director pointed us to a post on the senator's X page calling the Unusual Whales post inaccurate. 

Scott's amended documents

First, Snopes attempted to determine exactly which trades the post was referring to. Searching the Senate's database on financial disclosures for Scott's name revealed that on Aug. 13, 2025, he filed four "amendments" to periodic transaction reports originally filed across 2024. These were the most recent transaction reports Scott had filed. The presence of documents amending reports originally filed in 2024 mostly mirrored the claim's language that Scott had filed the reports "more than a year late." (One of the amendments was for a report in December 2024, within a year of the August 2025 post.)

Although members of Congress are not required to disclose the exact amount of money involved in transactions, they are required to place the amount in a range. The sum of the trades listed in the four transaction report amendments totaled somewhere between $13.4 million and $27.4 million in trades, in line with the $26 million figure cited in the post.

As a result, Snopes concluded that the four amendments were the disclosures referred to in the Unusual Whales post. In its response to Snopes, Unusual Whales did not deny this conclusion.

But the four documents in question were amendments to previously filed transaction reports, meaning they were not necessarily unreported or tardily reported trades. Reviewing the original reports from March 15, May 10, July 6 and Dec. 20, 2024, showed that all trades reported in the four amendments were also listed in the original reports, and were listed as the same amount.

Because all the trades listed in the amendments were listed in the original periodic transaction reports, the claim is false.

The trades were municipal bonds, not company stocks

The social media post described Scott's transaction as "trades … on companies he legislated." Snopes found that this also was misleading, according to the periodic transaction reports, because all trades were made on municipal securities — that is, municipal bonds, not companies.

In an email response to Snopes, Unusual Whales wrote that it was "notable that Rick Scott purchased Tampa Fla, along with other municipality bonds, a direct relationship with himself and his role as a politician."

Snopes asked Scott whether he thought trading municipal bonds issued for areas he directly represented would be a conflict of interest, but we did not receive a response to this question.

Scott is one of the wealthiest members of Congress. A February 2025 report from Investopedia listed Scott as the wealthiest, with a net worth at $549.4 million. At time of publishing, Quiver Quantitative, an investment firm that tracks and publishes Congressional stock trades, listed Scott as the third-wealthiest member of Congress, with a net worth of $500 million.

Unusual Whales's statement to Snopes pointed out that Scott has traded stocks in the past, calling his portfolio "huge," before noting that the trades described in its X post "were indeed just bonds, though in the past this has not been true."