Inside the global offshore money maze

By Anna Boiko-Weyrauch

You can search for companies and individuals in your area who are hiding assets offshore with a database maintained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Members of the team walked the audience through their project on offshore tax havens at the Saturday session, "Inside the global offshore money maze."

When the organization was leaked data about offshore service providers, journalists initially didn't know where to start looking, said ICIJ journalist Mar Cabra. A variety of tools allowed the consortium to distribute data and documents to journalists in countries around the world and search the dump of information to identify stories. 

Nuix, an Australian company, indexed text files, including Outlook emails, to allow for searching across documents, said David Donald of the Center for Public Integrity. To look across relational databases, the data team used dtSearch, he said. 

Excel is the best way to work with the data, Cabra said. You can also use an Excel add-in called Fuzzy Lookup to match the ICIJ data to a list of folks from your area you want to search.