Be sure to check out our post today by the Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group using Sunlight’s Party Time invites to discover that at least ten senators who sit on the Banking and Agriculture Committees are listed as beneficiaries of fundraisers hosted by lobbyists who have pressed Congress on financial reform issues.

To write this story, we combed the extensive database at Party Time looking at fundraisers that were held since January of this year for members of the Senate Banking and Agriculture Committee. We looked for any lobbyists who hosted these events and searched for them in the House Lobbying Disclosure database for work performed this year related to banking and financial reform.

Here’s how you can do what we did to find out if your lawmaker has met with lobbyists working on financial reform:

* Search the Party Time database for your lawmaker for any recent invitations in 2010.

* Open the PDF of the invitation and see if any “hosts” or “co-hosts” are listed. Not all hosts are registered lobbyists, but an awful lot are.

* Search the House Lobbying Disclosure database for names that could be lobbyists. We used the tiered search to better refine what we were looking for. First we selected “Lobbyist Name” and typed in the names we were looking for (you have to enter them Last Name, First Name). In the second search bar we selected “Filing Year” 2010 and in the third search bar we selected “Issue Code” Banking. We’ll follow up with more searches in the days to come.