A report by ProPublica’s Jake Bernstein and Jesse Eisinger “shows for the first time the extent to which banks — primarily Merrill Lynch, but also Citigroup, UBS and others — bought their own products and cranked up an assembly line that otherwise should have flagged.” These banks dealt in collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs. A [...]
Archive for the ‘Business’ Category
Small Business Administration failed hurricane victims in Gulf
August 24th, 2010 
Beth The Associated Press investigated how the Small Business Administration responded to the hurricanes of 2005, and the impact on the Gulf Coast five year later. The yearlong investigation by Mitch Weiss, Michael Kunzelman, Holbrook Mohr and Cain Burdeau found that loan officers rejected loans they should have approved, deleted loan applications for no valid reason, [...]
Thai Workers Victims of Human Trafficking In Utah
August 18th, 2010 alecia Lee Davidson reported how Thai workers recruited to work on Utah pig and chicken farms were victims of human trafficking. Read “A Story of Modern Slavery in Utah.”
Posted in Business, Homeland Security, International, Justice (courts/crime/law), Workplace 
Comments OffInvestigateWest:Cruise Ships Dump Waste To Dodge Laws
August 18th, 2010 alecia An InvestigateWest report on the billion dollar cruise ship industry in the Washington-Alaska cruise market found that most ships avoid tougher state regulations and dump their waste in Canadian waters between the two states, despite state efforts to adopt stricter standards for sewage and wastewater discharge.
Mortgage Fraud Spawning New Scams
August 18th, 2010 alecia Mortgage fraud is a crime that cost an estimated $14 billion in 2009, prompting the FBI to assemble its largest ever team to fight it. But the tsunami of foreclosures is making classic scams easier and spawning new ones to boot. Reuters correspondent Nick Carey reports from Chicago.
OneUnited bank was weakest to receive TARP support
August 10th, 2010 Beth A report on Bank Tracker, a project of the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, shows that OneUnited Bank, the bank at the center of the allegations against Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., was the weakest TARP bank at the time of its rescue. “When then Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced creation of the so-called “Capital [...]
Insurers profit on policies of fallen soldiers
July 29th, 2010 Beth An investigation by David Evans of Bloomberg found that Prudential Insurance has been profiting on life insurance policies of deceased veterans. The funds are held in “Prudential’s general corporate account, earning investment income for the insurer.” According to regulatory filings from 2008, survivors were being paid 1 percent interest on their Alliance Accounts, while Prudential [...]
Board members profit from part-time work
June 29th, 2010 Beth An accountant, a lawyer and two retired executives each collected more than $475,000 last year – and one topped $600,000 – doing part-time work for multiple Wisconsin companies, according to review of Securities and Exchange Commission data by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Cary Spivak. The men are members of corporate America’s most elite club: the [...]
Schools profit off of student credit card debt
June 12th, 2010 Beth An investigation by the Huffington Post Investigative Fund found “some of the nation’s largest and most elite universities stand to gain millions of dollars from selling the names and addresses of students and alumni to credit card companies while granting the companies special access to school events.“ The schools earn bonuses when the credit cards [...]
Feds investigate possible billing fraud at Texas medical school, hospital
June 3rd, 2010 Beth The Dallas Morning News’ Reese Dunklin and Miles Moffeit reported that a Dallas medical school and its teaching hospital are under federal investigation in possible Medicare and Medicaid fraud, billing for patient services that doctors didn’t provide. It is the second time in less than a week that allegations of billing fraud hit the two [...]
