Receipts only.
Pay for Play Nevada is a public-records reference site. We are journalists, not prosecutors. We do not assert criminal wrongdoing. We document the public record and let voters draw their own inferences.
Source-of-truth standard
Every quantitative claim on this site traces to one or more of these primary sources:
- Nevada Secretary of State Aurora bulk export — campaign-finance contributions, expenditures, candidate filings, committee filings, business-entity records.
- NV Legislature (NELIS) — bill text, sponsor lists, committee assignments, roll-call votes, lobbyist disclosures (NRS 218H Forms 1 + 2).
- NV Ethics Commission — disclosures filed under NRS 281A.
- Federal Election Commission (FEC) — federal-side individual contributions, committee filings, candidate filings.
- Internal Revenue Service (Form 990) — nonprofit and 527 disclosures, including Schedule I (grants), Schedule O (narrative), Part VII (officer/director compensation).
- USASpending.gov — federal contracts and grants to NV-headquartered vendors.
- State + local checkbooks — vendor-payment disclosures from NV State, Clark County, City of Las Vegas, City of Henderson, City of Reno, and others.
- CMS Open Payments — federally-disclosed Big Pharma transfers to NV-licensed physicians.
- Court of record filings — NV district court, federal District of Nevada, and 9th Circuit dockets.
What we don't do
- We do not paraphrase, "stylize," or "tone-shift" filings. If a contribution amount is $9,837.16, we report $9,837.16. If a lobbyist registered on March 12, we report March 12.
- We do not infer mental states. "Bribed," "corrupt," "intent to influence" — we don't use these words about specific individuals unless they are quoted from a court of record.
- We do not assert causation. The donor list and the voting record are presented side-by-side. The voter draws the inference.
- We do not use copyright-protected source material as our own. Where third-party reporting (Nevada Independent, Las Vegas Review-Journal, RGJ, ProPublica, etc.) is the public-record entry point, we cite and link.
- We do not publish private contact information. Home addresses, family members, minor children — none of it appears here even if it is technically available somewhere.
Detection framework
The 37 detectors in our patterns page are the operational backbone. Each detector is:
- Defined — a written specification of what data points must match.
- Implemented — code in the NPE auditor repository that runs against the source datasets and produces flagged records.
- Tiered — assigned a default evidence tier (Direct / Indirect / Inference) so the threshold for publication is clear.
- Reviewed — every flag surfaced by an auditor run is human-reviewed before publication; many never reach a page because the public-record context defuses the apparent anomaly.
Editorial standard
Every page on this site reads identically regardless of party affiliation. Tracy Brown-May (D, AD-42) and Joe Lombardo (R, Governor) get the same treatment. The donor list is the donor list. The voting record is the voting record. We do not put a thumb on the scale based on party.
Corrections + tip handling
If you spot a factual error — a wrong dollar amount, a misattributed contribution, a misspelled name, a date that doesn't match the filing — we want to know. The process and the channel are documented on our tips page.
Reproducibility
The data warehouse that powers this site is the nv_civic_platform PostgreSQL database described in NPE's methodology page. Every claim on this site is backed by a queryable row in that warehouse. If you are an academic researcher or a journalist who wants to verify a specific claim, send a query specification through tips.