📚 Data Sources & Methodology

⚠️ Known Data Gaps

2017–2021 Record-Keeping Issues

The State Department's Office of Inspector General identified significant record-keeping problems during this period (see Management Assistance Report ESP-22-01).

As noted in the official reports: "The information is not available. The Department of State's Office of the Inspector General identified the lack of accurate recordkeeping pertaining to diplomatic gifts maintained by the Office of the Chief of Protocol's Gift Unit between January 20, 2017, and January 20, 2021."

2020: COVID-19 Impact

Calendar year 2020 has notably fewer records due to reduced diplomatic activity during the COVID-19 pandemic, combined with the record-keeping issues noted above.

Reporting Threshold Changes

The "minimal value" threshold has changed over time. Only gifts exceeding this threshold are reported:

• 2019: $390
• 2020–2022: $415
• 2023+: $480

🔍 Data Quality Notes

PDF Parsing Limitations

Some data (2022–2023) was extracted from PDF documents using automated parsing. This process has inherent limitations:

• Donor coverage: ~50% of records have complete donor information
• Date coverage: ~71% of records have complete date information
• Text artifacts: Some hyphenation and line-break issues from PDF extraction

Unknown Values

Some records have "Unknown" for recipient, donor, or country. This occurs when:

• The original Federal Register notice omitted the information
• PDF parsing could not extract the data
• Record-keeping gaps (especially 2017–2021)

Current unknown values: 97 gifts with unknown donors , 1422 gifts with unknown countries

Late-Filed Gifts

Each annual report may include gifts from prior years that were filed late. We record gifts by their actual receipt year when available.