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palewire / django-calaccess-campaign-browser

A Django app to refine, review and republish campaign finance data drawn from the California Secretary of State’s CAL-ACCESS database
http://django-calaccess-campaign-browser.californiacivicdata.org
MIT License
17 stars 12 forks source link

Develop a routine to dig out the Schedule G "sub expenditures" #212

Open palewire opened 9 years ago

palewire commented 9 years ago

An example would be the US Bank credit card payments made by Fabian Nunez.

dmontgomery commented 9 years ago

The fields in the .CAL format that provide the relationship between Schedules E/F and payments on subvendors on G are optional for e-filing vendors and many times flat-out wrong, even if populated.

It would be optimistic to think an automatic linking from G to E/F transactions could match more than 50% of all Schedule G records using EXPN fields 51 (BackRef_TID) and 52 (G_From_E_F).

The next best fallback is going to be a string comparison between the Schedule G 'Agent' name fields and the 'Payee' of the E/F. I'd be willing to bet that wouldn't get us any higher than an 80% match rate.

Do you have an idea what you would want to do with the resulting unmatched G records?

palewire commented 9 years ago

I don't. The inspiration for this idea is this story which I'm told was nailed down by studying Schedule G records. I'm interested in whether we might be able to detect similar behavior if we surface the data.

Sounds like you know the particulars of this schedule way better than I do. I'd be open to any proposals you had.

dmontgomery commented 9 years ago

That's just classic. Is there a requirement somewhere that says Bob Stern receives a phone call whenever someone writes a story about campaign finance? ;)

So, in your opinion, which causes more voter outrage: the undeniable misuse of campaign funds for family travel or the questionable misuse of campaign funds for travel to a glamorous destination?

Of course, with this story as prompting, I searched for 'Paris' across all e-filed statements we have access to:

https://cal-access.com/#/search?search=BG4AJ