How we work · What we can prove · What we cannot

Methodology

If this goes viral without methodology, it looks like a meme. With methodology, it looks like a public-interest product with jokes.

What Got Receipts is

Got Receipts is a public-disclosure tracker. It organises publicly available financial disclosures from politicians, corporate insiders, and related entities, then scores each filing on a weighted signal model based on timing, committee access, market movement, and disclosure behaviour. Scores are public-record analysis signals, not legal findings.

We are a smoke alarm. Sometimes it's toast. Sometimes it's the curtains. We do not determine which.

Got Receipts does not allege unlawful conduct or access to nonpublic information. We organise public receipts, explain why a trade may raise eyebrows, and show benign explanations too.

What we can and cannot prove

✓ We track public filings only
✓ We show benign explanations for every receipt
✓ We score signals, not legal findings
✓ We link every source
✓ We flag our own limitations
✓ We publish our scoring model
✗ We do not prove wrongdoing
✗ We do not give legal advice
✗ We do not give investment advice
✗ We do not make legal accusations
✗ We do not invent facts
✗ We do not use AI to make legal findings
Important rule on AI use: AI can write “This looks relevant because Nvidia is exposed to semiconductor export rules.” AI cannot decide “This person had inside information.” That distinction is the whole product. LLM is used only for explanations, not findings.

Data sources by country

🇺🇸

United States

Live
Transaction-level trade disclosure with committee and policy overlap.

Sources

  • →House Clerk Periodic Transaction Reports (PTRs)
  • →Senate eFD public financial disclosure data
  • →Capitol Trades public disclosure scraper
  • →SEC EDGAR Form 4 (corporate insiders)
  • →congress.gov committee assignments and policy events
  • →yfinance (price data)

Strongest starting point. The STOCK Act requires senators and senior staff to disclose purchases, sales, or exchanges of stocks, bonds, commodities futures, and other securities over $1,000 within 45 days.

🇬🇧

United Kingdom

Not in this launch
Registered interests and conflict signals, not live stock trades.

Sources

  • →UK Parliament Register of Members' Financial Interests (out of launch scope — politician-disclosure ingestion, not corporate insider trades)
  • →Investegate PDMR regulatory announcements (backend pipeline exists but is hidden pending a data-quality fix)

The UK Parliament Register is a politician-disclosure feed, which is explicitly out of scope for this launch (see LAUNCH_SCOPE.md) and distinct from the corporate Investegate/LSE insider feed below it. The Investegate/LSE corporate feed is temporarily hidden while a name-parsing bug fix is deployed. Neither is currently visible on the site.

🇩🇪

Germany

Live
Outside interests, roles, income, company links, and policy proximity.

Sources

  • →BaFin Directors' Dealings disclosures

Germany requires disclosure of outside activities, income, company functions, associations, foundations, shareholdings, and other reportable interests. Members must report outside income above certain thresholds.

🇦🇺

Australia

Coming soon
Parliamentary interest disclosure tracker with family-interest limitations noted.

Sources

  • →ASX direct announcement JSON

Australian House members must provide registrable interests within 28 days, including interests of their spouse/partner and dependent children. For senators, family interests are kept confidential unless the committee considers a conflict arises.

Data pipeline

1

Pull new public disclosures daily

Scheduled ingestion from all source APIs and document feeds.

2

Store current lineage

Current system stores source links and parsed payloads. Planned hardening adds immutable raw document storage, SHA-256 hashes, and source_documents lineage.

3

Parse with deterministic parser where possible

Structured data (XML, CSV) parsed without AI. AI used only for messy PDFs and summaries.

4

Normalise names, tickers, dates, entities

Consistent format across all jurisdictions.

5

Match companies to sectors

SIC codes and manual sector tagging for committee relevance matching.

6

Match sectors to committees and policy events

Committee assignment data cross-referenced against company sectors.

7

Pull price movement

Stock price before and after filing date via yfinance.

8

Generate receipt score

Weighted signal model applied. Score stored with component breakdown.

9

Generate beginner explanation

AI writes the plain-English explainer. AI does not determine findings.

10

Save with source links and audit logs

Every score traceable to its source data.

Known limitations

· Not all jurisdictions have transaction-level trade data. Germany and Australia are interest-disclosure systems, not real-time stock-trade trackers. UK data is not part of this launch.
· Family-member data is partially confidential in Australia (senators) and inconsistently structured in Germany.
· Committee cross-referencing is imperfect. A politician may sit on a committee tangentially related to a sector without having specific access to the relevant information.
· Price movement data does not prove causation. Stocks move for many reasons.
· PTR filings can be amended. Got Receipts ingests the most recent version but may lag amendment processing.
· Blind trust claims cannot always be verified. We note the claim but cannot confirm operational independence.
· Got Receipts does not have access to nonpublic information. Scores are built entirely from public data.

Legal disclaimer

Got Receipts is a public-interest journalism and data project. All information published on this site is sourced from publicly available government disclosures and regulatory filings.

Nothing on this site constitutes legal advice, investment advice, or an allegation of wrongdoing. Receipt scores are signal indicators, not legal findings. The presence of a high receipt score does not imply wrongdoing or that any law has been broken.

Public records only · Not investment advice · Not a legal finding · Just receipts, context, and the occasional raised eyebrow.