SEC insider activity covers quarterly filings through June 30, 2026. Later filings are not included. Reported roles do not establish current employment or current holdings. SEC filing documents, sections and filing-text search cover filings dated January 1, 2000 onward. Earlier filings are deferred until after launch.
Pension coverage includes plan profiles, financials and asset allocations. Investment boards, security holdings and manager mandates are not included.
Coverage & limitations
What's accurate, what's documented, and what's being investigated
Poliscope is a transparency platform — which means we owe you honesty about what we're confident in and what's still rough. This page enumerates every documented limitation, with the context that makes the trade-offs visible.
Public coverage window
Currently surfaced cycles: 2016–2026.
Cycles before 2016 are excluded from the default browse experience while we resolve the structural FEC earmark-disclosure gap that predates the standard tp=15E tag adopted in the mid-2010s. Pre-2016 candidates with significant Joint Fundraiser Committee operations undercount by 30–50% in our reconstruction (Obama 2012, Romney 2012, etc.) — the donor→ ultimate-recipient dollars don't exist in our data sources for those cycles.
The historical data is still in our database and accessible via direct API calls, but it's not surfaced in cycle dropdowns or list views until we can deliver an honest pre-2016 reconstruction. Keeping this window explicit prevents an incomplete historical reconstruction from being mistaken for a complete comparison.
Headline accuracy commitment
Politician headline totals use FEC candidate totals where available. Committee headline totals use FEC committee totals where available; an unavailable FEC total stays unavailable rather than being replaced by a differently defined rollup.
- Candidate pages — Total Raised, Individual Contributions, Itemized, Unitemized: Sourced from FEC candidate-cycle totals. This is distinct from summing the itemized donor rows displayed elsewhere on the page.
- Standalone committee pages: Sourced from the FEC committee-total receipts field for that committee and cycle. When that source row is unavailable, the page does not substitute a transaction-derived summary as though it were the same metric.
- Donor breakdown panel (Top Donors, Industries, Employers): Aggregated from ingested FEC contribution filings, including earmark disclosures where available. These transaction-derived panels are labeled separately from FEC summary totals.
Documented limitations
Pre-2016 conduit/JFC pass-through donations
DocumentedAffects: Pre-2016 campaign-finance records (not shown in public cycle selectors)
What we show
Public politician, committee, and leaderboard controls are intentionally limited to 2016–2026.
What's limited
Joint Fundraiser Committee (JFC) pass-through donations from before ~2016 are undercounted. Pre-2016 cycles undercount candidates with significant JFC operations by 30–50%.
Context
FEC's earmark disclosure code (transaction_tp=15E) only became standard practice around 2014–2016. Before then, donations routed through joint fundraisers were filed only under the JFC's books, with no separate disclosure linking the original donor to the ultimate recipient. We exclude JFC pass-throughs to avoid double-counting on modern cycles where 15E disclosures exist; older cycles get under-counted because the disclosure simply doesn't exist in our data sources.
501(c)(4) and 501(c)(6) donor identities
DocumentedAffects: Dark money, nonprofits
What we show
Nonprofit-to-PAC grants (Schedule I), nonprofit officers (Part VII), nonprofit political spending (Schedule C), Super PAC inflows from named c4s.
What's limited
Original individual or corporate donors who fund 501(c)(4) and (c)(6) organizations are not disclosed by IRS rule. We can show what the c4 spent and where it sent grants, but not who paid into it.
Context
This is a federal disclosure-rule limitation, not a data-quality issue. No public-facing transparency platform — including OpenSecrets, FollowTheMoney, or ProPublica — has this data unless it's surfaced via journalistic investigations or court filings. We surface those when available.
Nonprofit officer cross-linking
InvestigatingAffects: /nonprofits/[ein] and /dark-money/source/[ein] (currently hidden from main nav)
What we show
Form 990 officer records show filed names, titles, and compensation where present.
What's limited
Officer names are not yet linked to their corresponding person entities, which means clicking through from a nonprofit officer to their other roles (committee treasurer, lobbyist, legislator) is currently broken. Pages are accessible by direct URL but are temporarily hidden from public navigation until the entity-resolution work lands.
Context
Names alone are not enough to approve cross-domain identity merges. Links require corroborating signals such as identifiers, employer or address overlap, and compatible role timing.
Gift sponsor identification
DocumentedAffects: Gifts and travel pages
What we show
Member name, gift description, value, sponsor name as filed.
What's limited
Gift and travel sponsors appear as filed-text names rather than entity_id-linked organizations. Cross-linking from a gift sponsor to the sponsor's other activities (lobbying, donations, contracts) requires manual lookup.
Context
Sponsor names on gift filings are free-text and inconsistent across years. Resolving them to canonical entities requires the same multi-signal matching used elsewhere; queued behind 990-officer ER.
FEC bulk-data publishing delay (donor breakdown freshness)
DocumentedAffects: Donor breakdown panel on politician and committee detail pages, recent/current cycles (2024 and 2026)
What we show
Headline Total Raised, Individual Contributions, Itemized, and Unitemized numbers come from FEC's API rollup endpoint and match FEC.gov exactly. The Top Donors list shows individual donors aggregated from FEC's bulk-data publications.
What's limited
On recent/current cycles, the running sum of the Top Donors panel can still run behind the headline FEC itemized total if FEC's API has fresher late-filed totals than the latest public bulk files. The headline FEC numbers are current where FEC API totals are loaded; the donor list follows the bulk files we have ingested.
Context
Each panel identifies whether it uses an FEC summary or transaction-level bulk filings. Source publication timing can make those views differ temporarily without changing their definitions.
Standalone committee FEC-total coverage
DocumentedAffects: Committee detail pages
What we show
When an authoritative FEC committee-total row exists for a committee and cycle, the headline uses that FEC value. If it is unavailable, the FEC headline is shown as unavailable rather than replaced with a differently defined rollup.
What's limited
Some committee/cycle pairs have no FEC totals row, and conduit/JFC cases do not always have one receipts field that answers every question. Transaction-derived panels remain separately labeled and are not presented as the missing FEC headline.
Context
Candidate pages and committee pages use distinct FEC summary endpoints and are validated separately. The UI preserves that distinction instead of silently substituting one metric for another.
Non-campaign source freshness
DocumentedAffects: Lobbying, government contracts, SEC filings, trades, and company pages
What we show
Federal lobbying registrations, USAspending contract awards, SEC filings and insider transactions, congressional trades, gifts, disclosures, nonprofits, pensions, and dark-money traces where available.
What's limited
These sources have different publication schedules and source-level quirks. USAspending, LDA, and SEC are not FEC-style cycle rollups, so accuracy depends more on current source refresh, row counts, entity linkage, and date sanity than on a single public total.
Context
Freshness and date-sanity checks are source-specific. Public records retain their source dates so users can distinguish a current refresh from a source publication lag.
ActBlue / WinRed standalone-committee benchmarks
DocumentedAffects: Conduit committee detail pages
What we show
Pass-through earmarks (15E disclosures) are correctly attributed to ultimate recipients, not to the conduit. Donor pages correctly credit the ultimate recipient candidate.
What's limited
ActBlue and WinRed's own headline 'total raised' is not benchmarked against a single FEC field because conduit receipts and earmark transfers have different meanings. These committee pages expose sourced fields without inventing a synthetic FEC-exact headline.
Context
This affects interpretation of the conduit committee itself, not attribution of earmarked transactions to their disclosed ultimate recipients.
2026 cycle data sparsity
ActiveAffects: Politicians and committees with 2026 as their current cycle
What we show
2026 filings loaded from the public source refreshes that have completed.
What's limited
The 2026 cycle is in progress. Current-cycle totals are partial and continue to change as committees file and the FEC publishes updates.
Context
Numbers will fill in as the cycle progresses. Switch the cycle filter to 2024 for a complete picture of the most recent finished cycle.
Bill semantic search coverage
ActiveAffects: Bill semantic search and bill detail pages for older Congresses
What we show
Full text and metadata for all bills 108th–119th Congress. Roll-call votes for the 118th House.
What's limited
Semantic results cover only bills with an available embedding. Keyword and identifier search remain the authoritative fallback for bills outside that semantic index.
Context
Search labels semantic and keyword results separately so the absence of a semantic match is not presented as proof that no bill exists.
How this compares with other sources
Every existing political-money tool has the same trade-off: pick a subset of disclosures to track well, document the rest as gaps. We made different choices about what to track well, and we're explicit about the gaps that result. Where the existing tools differ from us:
OpenSecrets
Strong editorial context and long-running campaign-finance coverage. Poliscope's candidate headline totals are tied directly to FEC candidate-total rollups, so our stated number is the FEC-reported receipt total rather than an editorially adjusted campaign status value.
FollowTheMoney
Strong on state-level data, thin on federal. No IRS 990 integration. We integrate both layers in the same graph.
ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer
Best-in-class 990 search but zero campaign finance data. We connect nonprofit grants → Super PAC inflows → independent expenditures → election outcomes.
FEC.gov
Authoritative on the disclosed transactions. No tax data, no lobbying, no contracts, no entity resolution. The same donor with three address variations appears as three different donors. We resolve them.