Follow the Money

Every claim. Every source. Every time.

About & Methodology

Follow the Money is a citizen archive of power and money, run by an archival researcher. It exists for one reason: to make corruption, waste, fraud, abuse, and extreme spending findable, citable, and impossible to hand-wave away.

The method is archival, not outrage-driven. Every entry starts from a primary source — the filing, the contract, the disclosure, the transcript — and every source is linked and archived so readers can check the work themselves.

What the status labels mean

Alleged

A credible claim exists — a filed lawsuit, a formal complaint, an opened investigation — but it is not proven. We report that the allegation exists and who made it, with the filing linked. We do not assert the underlying conduct as fact.

Documented

The facts are established by primary sources. We assert only what the documents show, quoted or directly described.

Adjudicated

A court, regulator, or official body has ruled. We report the ruling and link it.

When in doubt, we label down, not up.

How entries get verified

  1. Intake. Tips, news monitoring, and proactive research land in one queue.
  2. Triage. Is there a plausible primary source? If yes, it moves forward. If no, it's parked — never published.
  3. Verification. Locate the document, read it, confirm it, archive it, assign the status label.
  4. Drafting. One-sentence claim, dates, entities, sources, related entries. Dry prose; the facts carry it.
  5. Review. Second pass against the standards checklist.
  6. Publish & maintain. Entries are re-verified on a rolling basis. Status upgrades are published as updates, never silent edits.

How this is funded

The Ledger is free — no paywall, now or ever. It's funded by reader donations, affiliate links on further-reading modules (always disclosed), and commissioned research for campaigns, newsrooms, and organizations.

The hard rule, stated publicly: no sponsored entries, no pay-to-publish, no advertiser influence on status labels. Funders don't get to touch the ledger. That's both an ethical line and the reason you can trust it.

Need this rigor for your own question?

The same researcher behind this site takes commissions — sourced dossiers for campaigns, journalists, nonprofits, law firms, and authors. See the offer.