The IRE Resource Center is a major research library containing more than 23,250 investigative stories — both print and broadcast. These stories are searchable online or by contacting the Resource Center directly (573-882-3364 or rescntr@ire.org) where a researcher can help you pinpoint what you need. Browse or search the tipsheet section of our library below. Stories are not available for download but can be easily ordered by contacting the Resource Center:
Search results for "Fraud" ...
-
Counting Kids Out
"Counting Kids Out" exposed years of systemic cheating in Columbus City Schools, Ohio's largest school district. The rolling investigation has uncovered widespread fraud that likely resulted in higher-than-deserved report-card grades; inflated graduation rates; and bonuses for school workers who did not actually deserve them.
Tags: Columbus City Schools; cheating; fraud; graduation retes
-
KMOV: Welfare Withdrawal Fraud
Thousands of Missouri tax dollars spent in casinos, strip clubs, and bars.These are Missouri welfare cards being accessed for cash at ATMs in some bizarre places. The state can’t tell you how nearly $100 million of your tax dollars are actually spent because what’s purchased with that cash isn’t tracked, but the ATM locations are recorded. News 4 spent the last two years digging into this issue and continues to find plenty of red flags.
Tags: Taxes; taxpayers; welfare cards
-
Fields of Fraud
The most sweeping proposed reform of U.S. agricultural assistance since the Great Depression would replace most direct payments to farmers with federally-backed crop insurance—a change that is designed to save money. But this CNBC investigation finds the change could open the door to massive fraud. http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000097737&play=1
Tags: agriculture; fraud; tomato; U.S. Department of Agriculture; farming
-
Questionable Coverage
“Questionable Coverage” was a hidden camera investigative report about systematic health insurance scams affecting victims in nearly every state. As a direct result of our reporting, two companies ceased operations, a third has been sanctioned, and insurance regulators in Georgia and New York have launched their own investigations into the fraud.
Tags: health insurance; scams; fraud; hidden cameras
-
Stamping Out Fraud: Uncovering Rogue Food Stamp Retailers
A Scripps Howard News Service investigation has found found dozens of individuals who have been banned as food stamp merchants yet nonetheless remained in business in communities across the country because of lax governmental oversight. Scripps later identified more flaws in the program's oversight: Convicted thieves and cheats are running food-stamp stores around the nation, even though federal law is supposed to prohibit them from doing so.
Tags: Food stamp retailers; USDA; crime; criminals
-
Health Care Hustle
It is one of the biggest and most overlooked factors in the rising cost of health care. According to government estimates, fraud in programs like Medicare and Medicaid costs taxpayers $80 billion a year, with some estimates as high as twice that amount. Doctors, pharmacists, home health care providers, and even patients are hustling the system. Who's paying the tab? You Are.
Tags: Health care; fraud; Medicare; Medicaid; taxpayers; government authorities; patients
-
Platts: Russian Gas Giant Mines U.S. Energy Data
Russia’s state-owned natural gas company says the U.S. shale-gas boom is economically unsustainable — and it’s buttressing its claim with financial data collected by an American consulting firm located less than 20 miles from the White House. Moscow-based Gazprom, the world’s largest gas company, is working with Pace Global Energy Services, a consulting firm in Fairfax, Virginia, to analyze how much money U.S. gas companies are spending on hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. Gazprom, citing the Virginia company’s data, says the true costs of U.S. shale-gas production are upwards of 150% higher than the revenues its practitioners have been reaping in the last few years. Gazprom says this will ultimately lead to the demise of fracking-based shale-gas drilling in the US and other countries that are considering adopting it. But Gazprom’s critics say the company and its unlikely Washington-area ally are spreading “myths and misconceptions” about the U.S.-led shale-gas gas boom so that European and Asian countries will not develop their own shale plays, and will instead continue to buy conventional Russian gas.
Tags: Oil; gas; natural resources; fraud; oil wells
-
Platts: Oil and Gas Drillers Want ‘Confidential’ Wells
It’s no secret that oil and natural gas production is booming in North Dakota. But there are indeed countless secrets — technical, strategic and otherwise — associated with many of the wells that are being drilled in the Roughrider State. North Dakota maintains something called a “Confidential Well List.” Under state law, certain information about the 1,800-plus wells on this list -- such as production levels, geographical data and engineering specifications – is kept from the public for six months. North Dakota regulators argue that there are legitimate reasons for keeping this data from the public, such as encouraging so-called “wildcat” drilling operations in remote or undeveloped areas where little or nothing is known about the subsurface geology. But other oil and gas-producing states are sharply curtaining their use of such policies, saying they are outdated and conflict with the principles of open government. Wyoming, for example, recently revised its policy on the grounds that granting confidential status without good reason was inhibiting “the timely dissemination of well information to the public.”
Tags: Oil; gas; natural resources; fraud; oil wells
-
Platts: The Ugly Side of the U.S. Oil and Gas Boom
There is a nasty and ugly side to the oil and natural gas boom that the U.S. has enjoyed in recent years — a side that involves allegations of fraud, breach of contract and taking advantage of poor or unsophisticated landowners, among other things. This story is significant because these incidents are seldom reported, as the landowners, energy companies and other stakeholders have little to gain and a lot to lose by talking to journalists. But I managed to pull back the curtain on these little-known conflicts by piecing together court files and by interviewing key players, including a woman who could have been sued for “commercial defamation” for talking to me. Through these hard-to-get interviews and court documents, my story paints a colorful and sometimes disturbing portrait of the growing number of conflicts between landowners and the oil and natural gas companies that drill on their lands.
Tags: Oil; gas; natural resources; fraud; drill
-
Bales: Army suspect in Afghan shooting was liable in financial fraud
On the day that tips arose about a U.S. soldier who may have strafed two Afghan villages, I left the office for a flight to Tacoma. Within 48 hours of the soldier’s being identified as Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, I and two colleagues broke the news that the emerging hagiography of Bales drafted by family and attorneys had more to it than the story of a soldier who enlisted at the ripe of 27 driven by outrage over the 2001 terrorist attacks—and then broken down by an unrelenting cycle of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Our story started with pure spidey senses: Bales’ s family and lawyer said he had left a stockbroker’s career to enlist, as they explained his call to serve. Yet he had not finished college and clearly had financial troubles, I had determined. And he was active in brokerage in the late 1990s in Florida I learned by checking assorted online records—which raised my suspicions about the quick-money penny stock trading that was commonplace then. Based on those instincts, while also doing the running daily story from Bales’ Army base in Washington state, I had checked some online brokerage records and enlisted Julie Tate to look at others and run through civil and criminal filings in Ohio (Bales’s home state and then nationally). Within an hour, I had found one suspicious record and Julie had found others and we were off on a 30-hour run of investigative reporting and boots on the ground interviews that yielded the breaking news of Bales’s more complicated—and less laudatory—past in the period just before he joined the Army. We located and I interviewed an elderly couple who had lost substantial savings in accounts managed by Bales and received copies of detailed financial records that corroborated their claims and showed Bales as the account manager. We also peeled back corporate records for a now-shuttered firm run by Bales and his brother with backing from a longtime friend and reached him to further flesh out the checkered professional history of the Staff Sgt. at the center of an explosive, fast-moving and intensely competitive story. The story demanded intense investigative reporting that netted notable results in far far less than 30 days of a breaking event.
Tags: U.S. soldier; Afghanistan; military draft; terrorist attacks; deployment