Company and ticker links

A link says one thing: this contractor is that SEC-registered company, with ticker X. It is about identity. It says nothing about whether anyone influenced an award, and a member holding a stock in a company that holds contracts is not, by itself, a finding.

• The SEC’s list of registered companies and tickers, and each company’s EDGAR filing record. sec.gov ↗
• The list of subsidiaries that a company files with its latest annual report (Exhibit 21).
• Contractor and parent-company names and IDs from USAspending.gov ↗.

The rule is called r7-v1. Names are first tidied (punctuation, “Inc.” and “Corporation” spellings, capital letters). A link is confirmed by code only when the name belongs to exactly one SEC registrant and one of these holds:

1. The contractor is the registrant. It has the same ID, or the same tidied name, as the public company.
2. The contractor sits under the registrant in USAspending’s parent chain, and there is separate evidence: the contractor’s name starts with a distinctive word of the parent’s name, or the parent’s own subsidiary list names it. The parent field alone is not enough, and joint ventures are never confirmed.

Everything else, such as close-but-not-equal names, ambiguous names, former company names, and subsidiaries the parent field does not connect, goes to a review queue. A fuzzy match is never confirmed by code. Only a person can confirm a queued match, and that decision is kept when the job re-runs. The site shows confirmed links only.

• Coverage is partial on purpose.

  About 57% of the dollars in the non-competed FY2026 awards we load link to a confirmed ticker (October 2026). Against all non-competed spending the share is lower. Most of the rest is not a listed company at all: private firms, foreign companies with no SEC listing, universities and research centers, and joint ventures.

• No link does not mean no relationship.

  A contractor with no confirmed ticker may still be owned by, or tied to, a public company. We leave it unlinked until we can show why.

• One company can have several tickers.

  Different share classes carry different symbols. For issuers of exchange-traded notes, which have many symbols, we link through the primary ticker only.

• Trade tickers are as filed.

  The ticker on a stock trade is what the member’s filing says. If the ticker column is blank we use the symbol the filer wrote in the asset name, in three fixed notations, and nothing else. A wrong or unusual symbol in a filing can stop a trade from linking.

• Links reflect the date of the load.

  Companies merge, rename and delist. Each link records the rule version and when it was made.

After the job runs we draw random samples of confirmed pairs and check each against the contractor’s USAspending record and the company’s SEC record, one pair at a time. The first sample exposed a real problem (note issuers with many tickers), and the rule was changed to fix it.

Audit status. The builder’s two samples of 30 confirmed pairs each matched (October 2026), and a separate review on October 4, 2026 checked a further sample of links against their sources. These are samples, so this page publishes no overall match rate.

Think a link is wrong? Report an error. Contracts are described on the contracts page.