Backgrounding People & Companies

These backgrounding resources apply to people, private companies, public companies, non-profit organizations, and non-governmental organizations.

• For a company, search: hlp=(the geo group)

This will search the headline and lead paragraph for phrase "the geo group".

• For a company, try something like: hlp=(the geo group* and prison*) and atleast10 geo*

This will search for the geo group in the headline and lead paragraph and (and is really important in commercial databases) the word geo appears at least 10 x in the article. The asterisk means it is searching for variations of a word, like prison’s, prisoner, prison.

• For a company, be sure to search on the company and to search the people who are company officials.
• For a person, search: hlp=(firstname near2 lastname).

• Google and Google News Search

• For a company: put the company name in quotation marks.
• For a person: search “firstname * lastname” (this will search for middle or maiden names or initials).

• Global Investigative Journalism Conference 2015 Tipsheets, especially Margot Williams' and Gary Price's 
• careeronestop from the Dept. of Labor - locate licensing agencies by State
• OpenCorporates The largest open database of companies in the world
• Investigative Dashboard Registries, leaks and sanctions lists help you to find persons of interest and their assets.
• OCCRP's Aleph investigative data platform - provides public access to a vast archive of government records and open databases.
• Catalog of Research Databases From OCCRP, by country and type
• Offshore Leaks Database from ICIJ - Panama Papers, the Offshore Leaks and the Bahamas Leaks investigations
• Investigating The Shipping Industry Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC)
• Watchdog Watcher's, International Databases List by Columbia University's Sheila S. Colonel 
• Foreign Influence Peddling Resources
• UK Land Registry
• Global Witness’ Idiot’s Guide to Money Laundering
• Great Rip-off Map Global Witness
• Following the money: An advocate’s guide to securing accountability in agricultural investments, from  International Institute for Environment and Development and Inclusive Development International
• Open Land Contracts  repository of publicly available investment contracts for land, agriculture, and forestry projects
• EveryPolitician: The world’s richest open dataset on politicians
• No Easy Task: Quantifying Illicit Financial Flows Financial Transparency Coalition
• THE SWISS ARMY KNIFE FOR JOURNALISTS Digital investigative tools in the era of Big Data By David Hidalgo & Fabiola Torres 
• A curated list of amazingly awesome OSINT Company Research

 In other counties across the country search property records with the county name or tax assessor's office.