Service Description

Money provides one of the most revealing windows into someone’s life. This workshop teaches you how to read financial disclosures and other records to understand how a person earns, spends and protects their income. **Start with financial disclosures** You will learn how to download and analyze personal financial statements filed at local, state and federal levels and how to use those documents to identify income sources, employment relationships, investments and financial red flags. We will go over how tools like DocumentCloud can be used to analyze these documents. **Look beyond the forms** From property ownership and unpaid taxes to vehicles, aircraft and other major assets, financial records can paint a picture that is far more human than it seems. This session shows how to identify assets, liabilities, debts and UCC filings so you can understand a subject’s financial world from multiple angles. This workshop equips you with practical methods for interpreting financial data and spotting leads that reveal more than numbers alone. **Start with what is knowable** Using open sources and powerful databases, you will learn how to gather the essential facts that anchor any backgrounding project. Addresses, phone numbers, email history, personal milestones and basic relationships all become puzzle pieces that help you understand a subject’s story. **Track the people who matter** Lives intersect. That means the people around your subject can help you verify details, deepen context and expand your reporting. In this session you will learn how to build and maintain a list of associates from family to business partners to past classmates and how these connections can help illuminate the person you are investigating. This workshop offers the building blocks of strong backgrounding, showing you how to turn loose details into a clear, meaningful picture.