Two rules behind every total
This ledger starts in fiscal 2010 (July 2009), the first year Massachusetts put its spending records online. Penalties, donations and lobbying before then are left out so every comparison covers the same years.
How penalty amounts are counted: each row counts the cash the defendant actually paid (penalties, restitution, damages, fees). Press-release headline figures are often larger because they include debt relief, forgiven debt or rent, bill credits, conditional amounts, or proposed penalties that can still be contested. Those parts are not counted here. Every one is listed under Amounts not counted, with the headline figure, what we counted, the reason and the source. Where a release does not state the split between cash and relief, the case is left out of the totals and listed there.
Two rules for duplicates and shared totals
How duplicates are counted: when two records describe the same payment, it is counted once. A record is left out only when a primary document read for this ledger shows the dollars are the same. When that document cannot be read, a strong match is still counted once and is marked 'possible duplicate, counted once until verified'. Records for different payments are all counted, even when the amounts are equal. Every record left out stays in the gross figure and is listed under Amounts not counted, with the document behind the call.
Penalties: cash paid only. Amounts not counted
Top 15 companies by counted penalties
Select a bar to open that company below.
Source: corporate ledger table (ledger.json), penalties counted under the selected lens, from agency penalty releases, EPA ECHO, U.S. Department of Labor enforcement data and the Corporate Prosecution Registry. The table below lists every company.
State payments by fiscal year, stacked by payer
Source: connections table (graph.json, contract links by payer and fiscal year) from CTHRU (Comptroller), MBTA, Massport and MSBA payment records; net payments, fiscal 2027 is partial.
Confirmed donations by year, state vs federal
Source: connections table (graph.json, donation links) from OCPF and FEC contribution files, confirmed employer matches; state and federal are drawn side by side and never added.
Lobbying by year, firm fees vs in-house
Source: corporate ledger table (ledger.json, lobbying by year) from Secretary of the Commonwealth lobbying disclosures. Firm fees from 2010; in-house costs for 2025 and 2026 only.
Penalties, state payments, donations, lobbying and disclosed ties, by company
| Loading the ledger |
Source: corporate ledger table (ledger.json), built from agency penalty releases (Massachusetts Attorney General, U.S. Attorneys, SEC, Massachusetts Securities Division and other regulators), EPA ECHO, U.S. Department of Labor enforcement data and the Corporate Prosecution Registry; CTHRU, MBTA, Massport and MSBA payment records; OCPF and FEC contribution files; Secretary of the Commonwealth lobbying disclosures; officials' Statements of Financial Interest.
Counted and gross penalties
Gross is every penalty row on record. Counted leaves out a row when its dollars are already counted on another row (for example a state and a federal release announcing one settlement, or a plea and the agreement that goes with it, which the Corporate Prosecution Registry lists as two records), when it may be a duplicate that has not been verified (counted once until verified), and when its single payment is shared by several defendants and not split between them by the primary document, so each dollar is counted once and an unsplit payment counts for no company. A payment whose document states each defendant's share counts at that share. Where the two differ, the table shows gross under the counted figure. Every row left out is listed under Amounts not counted.
Columns
Without admitting fault is the share of the company's counted amount (both lenses) settled with no admission or with "neither admits nor denies"; the share whose record does not say is shown as unknown. State payments are net payments by fiscal year, fiscal 2010 on; the newest fiscal year is partial. Donations are gifts by people who report the company as their employer, matched exactly; they are not company money, and state (OCPF) and federal (FEC) totals are never added together. Disclosed ties are rows in officials' Statements of Financial Interest that name the company, 2019 to 2025.
Loading the overlap counts
Two rules behind every total
Owner's viewdraft, owner to confirm
It's a sad and tragic joke in Massachusetts that this is how business is done here. Everyone knows it.
This is the owner's opinion. It is not a statistic and not a finding, and it follows the audited facts above rather than resting on any one of them. In the sense the Hub's pay-to-play dashboard gives the term, pay to play describes organizations that depend on state funding, lobby the officials who control that funding, and have employees who donate to those officials. The facts shown for each named person or company stay what their own records say: donated, was paid by the state, lobbied, or disclosed a tie.
What these numbers do and do not show
They show which penalized companies also appear in other public records, and in what order the dates fall.
- They do not show that one thing caused another. Overlap is not causation: a donation, a lobbying filing or a state payment near a penalty is a correlation in the records and nothing more.
- They do not allege that any donation or lobbying filing broke a campaign-finance or lobbying rule. That money is reported in public filings. The regulator findings (improper payments to officials and political finance) are listed under Regulator findings, with their sources.
- Donations are gifts by individuals whose records show them working at a company. They are not payments by the company.
- A company missing from a list may be there under a name the matching did not catch. The gaps in each record are listed with its caveats.
Case files
Two companies, read record by record: what the government charged, what the state paid them, and who their employees gave to. Choose one.
A data profile for every company
Every one of the ... companies and institutions in the ledger has a data-only profile: the same charts, tables and sources as a case file, with no written analysis. Search by name, or start from the largest.
Explorer: pull the thread
Start from one company or official and follow its connections: penalties, state payments, donations, lobbying and officials' disclosed ties. Select a connected name to open its connections too.
Years are fiscal years for state payments (fiscal 2027 began in July 2026) and calendar years for the other records; gifts and filings from July to December 2009 fall in fiscal 2010 and are shown from the first step. Line width follows the summed amount; disclosed ties carry no amount. Employee donation lines are gifts by individuals who report the company as employer; they are not company money.
Four rules behind every total
This ledger starts in fiscal 2010 (July 2009), the first year Massachusetts put its spending records online. Penalties, donations and lobbying before then are left out so every comparison covers the same years.
How penalty amounts are counted: each row counts the cash the defendant actually paid (penalties, restitution, damages, fees). Press-release headline figures are often larger because they include debt relief, forgiven debt or rent, bill credits, conditional amounts, or proposed penalties that can still be contested. Those parts are not counted here. Every one is listed under Amounts not counted, with the headline figure, what we counted, the reason and the source. Where a release does not state the split between cash and relief, the case is left out of the totals and listed there.
How duplicates are counted: when two records describe the same payment, it is counted once. A record is left out only when a primary document read for this ledger shows the dollars are the same. When that document cannot be read, a strong match is still counted once and is marked 'possible duplicate, counted once until verified'. Records for different payments are all counted, even when the amounts are equal. Every record left out stays in the gross figure and is listed under Amounts not counted, with the document behind the call.
How shared totals are counted: when several defendants pay one total, each company counts only the share its primary document states. If the document gives a total and no split, and the payers include anyone outside the one company (another company, or individuals such as owners), the total is counted for no company: it stays in the gross figure and is listed under Amounts not counted. Where every payer named belongs to the one company, the whole total counts once, in full, for that company.
How to read this picture
The dots
- Filled circle: a company or institution that was penalized.
- Hollow circle: an official, or a campaign committee that received gifts.
- Square: an agency that imposed a penalty (the SEC, the Attorney General's office), a payer of state money (CTHRU, MBTA, Massport, MSBA) or a lobbying firm.
The lines
- Red, solid: a penalty, between the company and the agency that imposed it.
- Blue, dashed: money the state or one of its authorities paid the company.
- Green, dotted: gifts to a campaign by people who list the company as their employer. They are the employees' own gifts, not company money.
- Gold, dash-dot: lobbying fees the company paid a firm, or its own lobbying costs (recorded from 2025).
- Pink, dashed: an official's financial disclosure that lists the company (a job, a mortgage or an investment). It carries no dollar amount.
- A thicker line means more dollars added up across the years shown.
Using it
- Select a name to open its connections. Drag a dot to move it.
- Select a line to list the records behind it, with links to the sources.
- The year slider replays the picture from 2010, year by year.
- A "record" is one kind of connection in one year, for example one year of state payments. "Not drawn yet" means connections held back to keep the picture readable; the button adds 40 more.
What it does not show
A line means a record exists in the public data. It does not say one thing caused another. Two names connected is an overlap in the records, not a finding of wrongdoing.
Drag a node to move it. Select a line, or press Enter on it, to list its records with their sources.
Source: connections table (graph.json, summed by company, counterpart, type and year) and the company files (companies/<id>.json) behind each line, built from agency penalty releases and the Corporate Prosecution Registry; CTHRU, MBTA, Massport and MSBA payment records; OCPF and FEC contribution files (confirmed employer matches); Secretary of the Commonwealth lobbying disclosures; officials' Statements of Financial Interest.
Amounts not counted
How penalty amounts are counted: each row counts the cash the defendant actually paid (penalties, restitution, damages, fees). Press-release headline figures are often larger because they include debt relief, forgiven debt or rent, bill credits, conditional amounts, or proposed penalties that can still be contested. Those parts are not counted here. Every one is listed under Amounts not counted, with the headline figure, what we counted, the reason and the source. Where a release does not state the split between cash and relief, the case is left out of the totals and listed there.
Two rules for duplicates and shared totals
How duplicates are counted: when two records describe the same payment, it is counted once. A record is left out only when a primary document read for this ledger shows the dollars are the same. When that document cannot be read, a strong match is still counted once and is marked 'possible duplicate, counted once until verified'. Records for different payments are all counted, even when the amounts are equal. Every record left out stays in the gross figure and is listed under Amounts not counted, with the document behind the call.
How shared totals are counted: when several defendants pay one total, each company counts only the share its primary document states. If the document gives a total and no split, and the payers include anyone outside the one company (another company, or individuals such as owners), the total is counted for no company: it stays in the gross figure and is listed under Amounts not counted. Where every payer named belongs to the one company, the whole total counts once, in full, for that company.
Source: amounts-not-counted register (repo file data/manual/excluded-amounts.csv, copied into ledger.json), read from each case's agency release; skipped cases from the release-sourcing skip logs (repo folder review/batches).