TRACFED Guided Tour

Intro and Overview

TRACFED is a unique source of authoritative information about federal enforcement activities. Coverage includes all criminal matters recommended for prosecution in the federal courts and t he civil income tax audits by the IRS. TRACFED allows you to enter TRAC's massive data sets and order your own customized data package.

The site may seem a bit confusing at first glance. TRAC Express uses many similar fields across its areas, allowing for a variety of ways to develop different types of information.

This guided tour explains some of the differences and similarities of among areas within TRAC Express. With several guided demonstrations, you will learn which area of TRAC Express is best suited to extract the information you need.

The tour also explains how to submit requests and retrieve customized tables in TRAC Analyzer. We will also highlight some features of TRAC Analyzer such as e-mail notification and Web Locker.

Specific illustrations in this tour use tables and menus from TRACFED's Criminal Enforcement layer. But the principles you learn in this tour will guide you in using any of TRACFED's layers. This is because each layer has many of the same features and tools, and is laid out in similar ways.


TRAC EXPRESS & TRAC ANALYZER

TRACFED is divided into two main sections with two main data retrieval machines:

  • TRAC EXPRESS provides users with a speedy way to view the enforcement activities of the federal government from a number of different perspectives such as Overall, Agencies, Programs, and Lead Charge. By browsing through TRAC Express, you can quickly retrieve pre-constructed data tables from TRAC's clearinghouse.

  • Going Deeper is a sophisticated research tool that allows users to burrow into TRAC's layers of data to examine an interactively defined subset of cases, and they can subset cases by a large combination of criteria. Users will be able to define the order of their data searches, quickly and easily creating multi-dimensional models of the government's activities.
  • TRAC ANALYZER provides additional services. Here, the user can undertake different types of analyses on selected or specially created data slices. Because users customize their data slices, some additional time is required to compute the data.

At any time during this tour, you can click on the Road Map button below to view a site map of this tour and/or return to theTRACFED main page.

Let's first examine TRAC Express.