Brief

Last weekend I read an article regarding companies profiting from JobKeeper - an Australian government relief program aimed to support business who were significantly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. I was disappointed, yet not surprised, to learn that there was no public information provided by the government detailing the amount that individual companies received from tax-payers. However, I thought that publicly-listed companies on the ASX might mention JobKeeper & other COVID-related government support payments in their annual reports, and so, this project looks to automate scrapping this data.

• How much money was paid out to shareholders in the form of dividends while the company received government hand-outs?
• How many companies maintained or exceeded their yearly profits while receiving JobKeeper?

A lot more news-coverage has happened since I began this project and, in all honesty, journalists have reported, in greater detail & context, the same findings that I naively have made here. Some highlights:

• Public-backlash has led a number of companies to return Jobkeeper payments. [1] [2]
• Calls for transparency over these Jobkeeper payments continues to be fought over in parliament. [3]

Review

You can read some data from this script in REPORT.md
In short, there were four typical company-responses:

• Companies do not explicitly mention government support payments, or they were lumped together with other payments within the financials.
• Companies state they did not receive government support payments, but do not explain why; e.g. eligibility.
• Companies state they did receive government support payments, but are repaying them.
• Companies state they did receive government support payments, a lot of them & would kindly like you to bugger off.

Concessions

1. The board of directors has a fiduciary duty to act in the best interest of the company & its shareholders. The government had the responsibility to manage & police the JobKeeper program.
2. These scripts do not provide a complete picture to each company's response to government support.

Repo

This repo is not a package, but a collection of scripts. If you wish to use it, it is expected that you have an intermediate understanding of Python.

This repo does a few things:

1. Grabs list of top stocks from the ASX; i.e. ASX20, ASX100, etc.
2. Searches & downloads annual reports
3. Reads PDF reports for keywords such as JobKeeper, COVID, etc.
   • Saves an PDF copy with keywords highlighted
   • Saves cropped photos of highlighted keywords
4. Grabs company data from Yahoo Finance; i.e. gross profits, dividends, etc.

Note that due to the nature of web-scrapping, these scripts may cease to function if endpoints & APIs change.