Reporting & Public Records

Many companies require licenses or regulatory permits to operate. These companies include everything from nursing homes and child care facilities to contractors and pharmacies. The licensing and regulatory agencies have name indexes of the people or companies that they license or regulate, including the licensees’ addresses. More detailed information often is available, such as investigations…

The county recorder’s office is the place of record for publicly filing official documents, usually related to property. These include property sales, mortgage loans, defaults on mortgage loans, liens on property, etc. Name Index Documents filed with the county recorder’s office are indexed alphabetically by the names of people, companies and organizations that have filed…

Records on people who served in the military are available from the U.S. government. However, you have to formally request the records. Only very basic information is available online at websites that have posted data on military service. The main federal government depository for military records is the: National Archives See the U.S. National Archives…

Records of registered voters are kept on a county level, usually in a Voter Registrar’s Office, sometimes called an Elections Office. In California, copies of the voter registration records also are kept at the California Secretary of State’s Office. The information on a voter includes the person’s home address, political party affiliation, date of birth…

Lobbyists and companies or people who employ lobbyists in connection with federal, state or local legislation often must register with a government agency and file annual or quarterly reports on their activities. The reports include information such as the clients for which a lobbyist works and the specific legislation on which the lobbyist worked on…

Election returns from past elections can usually be found at the websites of a Secretary of State for state races, and at the websites of a county voter registrar or a county election department for local races. On election night, these same agencies post election returns on special sections of their websites as the returns…

To get copies of bills introduced in state Legislatures and the U.S. Congress, reporters used to have to go in person to state capitols or to Washington, D.C. But now states and the U.S. Congress have put legislative databases on the Web so you can find the bills that are pending or were passed by…

Politicians running for or holding elected office on a federal, state and local level often must file financial disclosure statements detailing their personal finances and business interests. These include information about their sources of income, investments they have, property they own, businesses in which they have a position or interest, and gifts and honorariums they…