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Anti-Corruption Action

We hunt enablers.

Authoritarianism does not sustain itself. It stands on the shoulders of enablers — the contractors, oligarchs, fixers, and corporations that provide the money, the infrastructure, and the cover that make authoritarian systems function. Expose the enablers, and you weaken the authoritarian. That is the entire theory behind Anti-Corruption Action.

ACA is a Delaware 501(c)(3) anti-corruption organization that has been operational for three years. It uses investigative techniques, open-source research, and anti-corruption tools to bring transparency to the enablers of authoritarianism — in Russia, in Ukraine, and increasingly here in the United States. ACA is the parent organization of the Dekleptocracy Project and one of the few Western organizations able to obtain corporate and banking records from inside Russia and from opaque jurisdictions such as Switzerland, Cyprus, and Kyrgyzstan.

ACA currently has three active projects.

The first is its flagship Ukraine program, which has been working to interrupt Western support for Putin's war since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022. In April 2026, ACA published a major 70-page research report on Russia's critical vulnerabilities in its industrial supply chain — specifically the specialty chemicals that Russian industry cannot produce domestically and must import through unsanctioned third-country suppliers. The report was delivered to multiple Western governments before its public release and is available at anticorruptionaction.org/research. A major coordinated campaign building on this research is set to launch in October 2026.

The second is the Quid Pro Quo Tracker, ACA's open-source investigative database that connects political donors, recipients, donations, and policy outcomes into a single searchable, visual interface. Existing platforms track donations or map power relationships, but none systematically connect money to specific policy outcomes. The Tracker closes that gap by linking campaign contributions, lobbying expenditures, and independent spending to the legislative votes, regulatory actions, and appointments that follow — entirely from public records. The Tracker is live at purchasingpolicy.org.

The third is the Cryptocurrency Transparency Database, a graph database that will enable the public to track the corporate entities, wallet addresses, banking relationships, and regulatory violations that enable Russia's estimated $20 billion in annual cryptocurrency sanctions evasion. The MVP is built. ACA is raising funds to bring it online, hire cryptocurrency analysts to populate it, and secure the litigation insurance necessary to withstand the aggressive legal response that cryptocurrency interests reliably direct at anyone who shines a light on their transactions. The database will be free and open to the public — journalists, researchers, regulators, and civil society worldwide.

Theory of Change

Authoritarianism cannot survive inside a rules-based order, which is why modern authoritarians spend so much energy trying to destroy it. Strengthening the rule of law is therefore the most direct path to weakening the authoritarian.

ACA's theory of change begins with a simple observation drawn from experience: when Alexei Navalny was most effective, he was not attacking Putin directly. He was exposing the enablers around him. The same pattern holds at every level of government and commerce. Every community has corrupt local leaders. Those leaders support corrupt regional leaders who support corrupt national ones. The same dynamic operates in the business world — in the corporate executives who shower authoritarian leaders with flattery and access in exchange for protection and profit.

The corruption ecosystem runs on impunity. Enablers act because they believe they will not be held accountable — because federal enforcement has been weak for decades and because the complexity of global financial systems obscures their conduct from public view. ACA attacks that impunity on two fronts simultaneously: it makes conduct visible through public records research and open-source investigation, and it identifies the legal jurisdictions and mechanisms — state regulators, international sanctions authorities, foreign governments, civil litigation — where that conduct can be acted upon.

The cascade effect does not require winning every fight. It requires raising the cost of enabling authoritarianism to the point where the calculus changes. When enablers begin to worry about accountability — when a corporate board, a lender, a foreign regulator, or a journalist armed with ACA's data asks hard questions — the protection that authoritarianism promises starts to look less reliable. That is the pressure point ACA is building toward, one investigation at a time.