I have never met Steven J. Ding, chief of staff to the U.S. House Resources Committee and a top political adviser to its chairman, Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., who recently lost his re-election bid. I've never been in the same room with Ding, and we have spoken on the telephone only a few times. Yet after digging through congressional spending documents, personal financial disclosures, campaign finance reports and other records, and then using them to build databases, I was able to paint a picture of Ding for our readers.

Ding preferred venti-sized Starbucks coffee, parked often at the Sacramento airport, usually on Mondays, and left his car for four days. He spent a lot of time on planes and at Capitol Hill hotels. Between 2000 and 2004, he received at least $114,240 in political consulting fees from California Republican politicians, some of it in violation of congressional rules. Last year, two colleagues and I began to comb through records related to the land holdings of Pombo and his family in California's Central Valley.

We heard that Pombo had allowed his top aide unusual job freedom, so I began gathering documents and eventually broke away to focus on Ding. I learned that Ding traveled almost weekly between his home in Stockton, Calif., and Washington, where he stayed in a Capitol Hill hotel at taxpayer expense when the committee was in session. To examine the travel, I needed copies of Pombo's "representational account" reports for five years.

These documents, available only in the House Clerk's Office, show all salaries and expenses paid from a House member's office budget. Two colleagues passing through Washington obtained copies for me. These documents, in tiny type, contained dozens of references to "Ding airfare Sac-DC" or "Ding airfare DC-SF." There were other references to "Ding lodging" or "Ding sustenance." The hotel and food entries didn't specify where the money was spent, but the dates on the travel records told me that Ding had to have incurred them in Washington.

I entered all of the costs into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. They showed that during the three-year period in which Ding worked for the committee but lived in Stockton, he charged more than $87,000 in travel expenses to Pombo's district office. Pombo appointed Ding to run the House Resources Committee when he became its chairman in 2002; Ding had worked for the congressman in California since 1992.

I also learned from the Pombo office spending documents that Ding was getting paid $100 a month as Pombo's chief of staff. This was in addition to his committee salary of more than $150,000 a year. That item in the office budget, Ding later said, permitted him to commute from California to Washington at taxpayer expense. By still doing some work on Pombo's district staff, he considered his congressional "duty station" to be California.

That, he said, entitled him to government travel when he was needed back in Washington for committee business. If he had attempted to bill this travel to the committee, it would have been rejected. Committee rules state: "living and commuting expenses are not reimbursable." In California, Ding frequently worked for Republicans with close ties to Pombo, an analysis of state and congressional records showed.

Top House staffers must file annual financial disclosure statements. Ding's showed income from several political candidates and consultants, including a Sacramento firm that ran Pombo's campaigns. Congressional rules limit the amount of money that staffers can receive each year on top of their government salaries. For one year, Ding reported that he received an amount that exceeded the limit. I started digging more deeply.

The California Secretary of State maintains a campaign finance Web site (http://cal-access.ss.ca.gov/Campaign) with advanced search functions. When I entered Ding's name as a vendor and searched all records, I got numerous hits. One showed that he received $30,000 in one month from a candidate in the 2003 gubernatorial recall election. I used Excel and Microsoft Access database manager to show how much Ding was paid compared to what he had reported to Congress.

In all, the state finance records showed he received $35,000 in payments for that year. In contrast, Ding reported $20,000 in outside income on his House financial disclosure statement. Congressional rules limited outside income that year to about $22,000. The state records also showed that Ding received a $1,000 payment in 2000 that he failed to report to Congress. Additionally, in 2002 he reported income that exceeded the congressional limit by $5,000.