Data Sources

Recipient Data

Covid Stimulus Watch compiles data released by federal agencies on the recipients of various CARES Act and ARPA grant and loan programs. The number of recipients per programs varies from a few dozen to thousands, and in the case of the Paycheck Protection Program, hundreds of thousands. Initially, our PPP records consisted of disclosures made in SEC filings, but on July 6, 2020 the Treasury Department posted the names of all recipients of loans of $150,000 or more.

Below are the online data sources for the largest CARES Act programs. Data sources for all programs can be found in the individual Covid Stimulus Watch entries.

Paycheck Protection Program
Economic Injury Disaster Loan
Provider Relief Fund - General Distribution
Provider Relief Fund COVID-19 High-Impact
Medicare Accelerated and Advance Payment Program
Payroll Support Program
Federal Reserve bond-buying programs

Below are the online data sources for the largest ARPA programs. Data sources for all programs can be found in the individual Covid Stimulus Watch entries.

Provider Relief Fund- American Rescue Plan Rural Payments
COVID-19 Coverage Assistance Fund: Claims Reimbursement to Health Care Providers and Facilities for Services to the Underinsured
Shuttered Venue Operators Grant
Restaurant Revitalization Fund

Basic Company Information

We obtained information on the headquarters location, ticker symbol, industry group and workforce size from the most recent 10-K SEC filing by the company.

Accountability Data Sources

Four of the six accountability categories we use are based on penalty data derived from Violation Tracker, a database on corporate misconduct produced by the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First. All the data covers the period from 2010 to the present. On our List of Awards we highlight those companies that have paid $1 million or more in any of the following four categories:

Employment-related penalties
Government contracting-related penalties
Environmental, healthcare and safety-related penalties
Consumer protection, financial misconduct and unfair competition-related penalties

The Tax and Subsidies category is derived from two sources. The first is the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy's report Corporate Tax Avoidance in the First Year of the Trump Tax Law. It contains effective federal tax rates for 2018 for Fortune 500 companies that reported a profit for the year. We highlight those companies that paid an effective rate below 10.5 percent, or less than half the statutory rate.

The other source we use is Good Jobs First’s Subsidy Tracker, which combines data on financial assistance to corporations awarded by more than 1,000 federal, state and local programs. We focus on those companies that have received $100 million or more in subsidy awards since 2010. When CARES Act recipient data is expanded to include banks, we will display the amount of financial assistance the company received under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

Our final accountability category is CEO Pay. We reviewed the most recent proxy statement of each publicly traded CARES Act recipient and extracted figures for the chief’s executive total compensation as well as the data on median worker pay and the ratio between those two amounts. Smaller companies are not required to disclose the ratio or the worker pay figure, so for those we collected only the CEO pay figure. We focus on those companies with ratios larger than 100:1. For those companies that do not provide ratios, we focus on those whose CEOs received total compensation of $2 million or more.

NOTE: While the accountability issue fields on the List of Awards highlight only those companies that meet the criteria above, the individual company pages show the actual penalty and other data amounts, whether or not the criteria are met.

Data Sources

Recipient Data

Basic Company Information

Accountability Data Sources

Other Accountability Links

Accountability Issues