- Joined
- 31.10.19
- Messages
- 1,750
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- Points
- 113
In our time, when there are almost no secrets left, people still want even more to hide their little secrets. But you can’t hide everything - especially if you’re a legal entity, such as a company operating in the United States. The biggest repository of information is the IRS, the tax authority (who could have guessed). But if we need to check the reliability of a counterparty or its financial condition, we can’t just write to them or call and ask: "Tell me, is that firm reliable? Can we work with them?" They’ll send you in a direction you won’t like. So what should we do? First, let’s determine what kind of organization it is: a public nonprofit or a private organization focused on profit extraction and nothing else. In the first case, catalogs like these help us:
- https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits - a catalog of U.S. nonprofits created by investigative journalists.
- https://opencorporates.com - a database that lets you find primary information around the world.
*I thought there would be more.
Searching by name gave us 9 people, including the subject’s son, Donald J. Trump Jr., and 256 records (mostly tax forms). The most recent entry is for 2024, so let’s look at that. It’s Form 990 for 2024 of an organization that dealt with the U.S. presidential election.
*public data, mind you.
From it we learn that the tax deduction received by this organization was $6,183,865.00 out of a total tax assessment of $14,592,127.00. That means the organization paid $8,408,262.00 in taxes. Key financial data:
So yes - there was money in this organization. Interaction with it took place openly. Of course it did - these are not offshore files. The second catalog gives us a bit more: https://opencorporates.com/officers?q=Donald+J+Trump&utf8= - it reports 255 officers (meaning 255 individuals with that name are listed in its database). A drawback of this catalog is that it doesn’t sort by date and some of the companies are inactive. On the other hand, it allows searching much deeper through time. Among active companies, we find:
*basic information.
What we see is that it’s a branch of a company with the same name, localized in the state of Delaware, U.S.
Next, we’ll follow the chain. Address: 251 LITTLE FALLS DRIVE — WILMINGTON DE 19808
*the office building: CSC Headquarters.
CSC Headquarters
https://www.cscglobal.com › cscglobal › home
Corporate office in Wilmington, United States
251 Little Falls Dr, Wilmington, DE 19808
Let’s be honest - it’s not exactly lavish. A consulting company; there’s not much information available. It’s oriented toward their clients. Reviews on https://www.yelp.com/biz/csc-wilmington-2?osq=Business+Consulting&override\_cta=Book+a+consultation are mixed, which suggests that although they accept clients from the outside, they’re not especially interested in them. Searching on https://projects.propublica.org for CSC Global leads us to 183 forms and records for 2024. Earlier years can also be found, but I filtered to the most recent one; otherwise you could get lost.
*183 records for 2024 - that’s still good.
So we can verify who interacted openly with this company throughout 2024. To identify all connections, you need to go deep into accounting documents. That’s not part of the lazy OSINT checker’s job. In this article, I’ve only provided a small direction that can make working on this kind of task easier. To go deeper, you’ll have to start unspooling chains of connections and accounting documentation. That will go beyond a single article and even beyond a course (and we haven’t even touched offshore structures yet)...
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