MSNBC.com investigative reporter Bill Dedman revealed the influence of Todd Palin, the husband of former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, during Palin’s time as governor. MSNBC.com staff combed through nearly 3,000 pages of e-mails to show Todd Palin involved in a judicial appointment, monitoring contract negotiations with a public employee union and passing  “financial information marked marked ‘confidential’ from his oil company employer to a state attorney.”  Working with Crivella West, MSNBC  published a searchable database of all the e-mails and detailed the open records request process with the state of Alaska that took more than two years.  In August 2008, the state of Alaska claimed it would cost as high as $15 million for state technicians to find the e-mails.

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“Seniors for Sale“, a Seattle Times investigation, found that inside the state’s 2,843 adult family homes, thousands of vulnerable adults have been exploited by profiteers or harmed by amateur caregivers. With videos and searchable database, the three-day series by reporter Michael J. Berens also reveals how Washington has pushed out the poor from nursing homes to save millions of dollars, but often resulting in harm to residents.

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San Diego County’s social welfare safety net is riddled with gaps. A voiceofsandiego.org investigation has found that the county government’s historical resistance to provide social welfare programs has left a wide chasm between last-resort aid and those on the bottom rungs of economic survival.

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Isaac Wolf of Scripps Howard News Service in Washington reports that “federal authorities have issued a sweeping order for some of the nation’s largest debt-collecting companies to open their books. In its first investigation of the $60 billion consumer debt resale market, the Federal Trade Commission has directed the nine companies that buy the most second-hand debt to turn over essentially all purchase and sales records for a six-month period in 2009.”

In November and December, a Scripps Howard News Service investigation showed how the development of a market for buying and selling old credit card debts has been blamed for leading collectors to pursue the wrong people, file baseless lawsuits and torpedo credit scores.

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Will Evans of California Watch found large corporations in California are getting hundreds of millions of dollars in federal stimulus dollars despite a history of environmental violations and a host of other legal problems.

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Ian Urbina of The New York Times reports that “state and federal lawmakers from around the country are pressing a variety of new laws that would make sweeping changes in the way runaways and prostituted children are handled by police officers and social workers.“  Much of the new legislation was prompted by a Times series showing how the recession has led to an increase of young runaways involved in prostitution.

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The Post-Standard (Syracuse, NY) used payroll records to show that two trainers at a police academy run by the sheriff have far more than doubled their pay through staggering amounts of overtime. The father of one of the trainers runs the academy. The marathon shifts have inflated the state pension the trainers will receive for decades.

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For two years, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter John Diedrich has been seeking documents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) on a local gun store that has been the subject of controversy. Despite heavy redactions by the agency, and differing responses to various FOIA requests, Diedrich was able to confirm the ATF recommended revocation of the store’s firearms license after a 2006 inspection. The store remains open, however, after players in the operation took on new roles to gain a clean slate. Diedrich’s package included a sidebar that looks at a budget provision that severely limits public access to ATF information.

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Clark Kauffman of the Des Moines Register reports that more than 300 mentally retarded wards of the state are being paid less than the minimum wage for work performed at two state-run homes for the disabled. Seventy-four of the workers are paid an average hourly wage of 60 cents or less, and some of the labor is performed for the benefit of various for-profit companies. One worker averages 11 cents an hour working for a company owned by one of the world’s richest private equity firms, the Carlyle Group. The wages are legal under a 71-year-old federal law intended to promote job opportunities for the disabled.

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The Fresno Bee published a two-part series on accountability problems with Fresno County First 5, an early childhood initiative approved by voters in 1998. The first story found that, despite promises made to voters and millions of dollars spent on evaluations, First 5 hasn’t produced a complete evaluation of its results, raising questions about the effectiveness of the programs. The second story found that every member of the First 5 commission has worked for or represented an agency that received money from the commission.

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