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The Corruption Accountability and Transparency Tool (CATT)

The investigative infrastructure that turns public records into public accountability.

Public records exist across hundreds of thousands of separate government datasets — state and local systems, corporate registries, nonprofit tax filings, federal spending databases — each locked behind its own search interface. Even when curiosity or anger sparks an investigation, ordinary citizens lack the time, skill, and confidence to connect the dots across siloed systems. The fragmentation of public records is not a neutral inconvenience. It is a systemic barrier that protects profit and power. The harder it is to investigate, the less people expect accountability, and the more entrenched corruption becomes.

CATT aggregates more than 360,000 public records datasets, including campaign donations, state and local records, nonprofit tax filings, federal spending and contract data, corporate registrations, and power mapping, with new datasets added nearly every day. It functions as a complete investigative workspace: a user enters a question, and CATT returns results from connected databases simultaneously. As the user clicks into records, the news aggregation module extracts named entities and automatically retargets the search so the thread carries forward without the user having to rebuild it from scratch.

Users save their work in collaborative workspaces, drag and drop documents for OCR and entity extraction, and build timelines that combine public records with news coverage. CATT itself uses no AI or large language models within the platform — which means no hallucinations, no hidden inferences, and no algorithmic intermediary between the user and the evidence. Users decide for themselves what the record shows.

The backend is built and already in use. The Dekleptocracy Alliance is running active investigations on it now. What remains is the funding to complete the user experience layer, put the tool in the hands of the public, and expand the dataset coverage that makes it genuinely national in scope.

Theory of Change

When citizens can investigate concrete local corruption themselves — a neighbor who donated to a city council race and then received a construction contract, a school board member whose consulting firm bills the district — they recognize unfairness they can act on instead of tuning out abstract national scandals. CATT puts verified public information directly in their hands, which builds the participatory infrastructure for accountability from the ground up rather than waiting for institutions to rebuild trust from the top down.

As parents, reporters, students, and watchdog groups use the tool to ask informed questions, journalists at under-resourced outlets can shift time from aggregation to analysis, and organizations monitoring multiple jurisdictions can recognize patterns at scale. The cumulative effect is to constrain actors who currently rely on fragmentation as cover — the no-bid contractor, the official whose consulting firm wins the contracts they oversee, the donor whose generosity arrives just before the favorable vote — and to help rebuild the shared factual ground that accountability requires.