Reporters from both organizations used records kept by the House and Senate to create a database of all travel disclosure forms for privately funded trips filed by members of Congress from Jan. 1, 2000, through June 30, 2004. Because senators are allowed to report trips on their annual financial disclosure forms rather than the trip reports, trips from Senate financial disclosure forms, which do not include cost totals for the trips, were included in the database. Northwestern University is in the database, having sponsored trips worth $1,752.

The database was created in order to analyze the trips taken to determine how much money was involved, who the sponsors were, which members of Congress accepted the trips and what the purposes of the trips were. It also was created and made available to the public on the Web at www.americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/congtravel or www.medillnewsdc.com to make the records more easily accessible to the public. The House and Senate records are available only by going to the Capitol Hill offices that house them.

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