The IRE office will be closed from December 25th to January 5th.
Blog
Wall Street titans have a new sweet spot — as surrogate tax collectors. Huffington Post Investigative Fund reporters Fred Schulte and Ben Protess describe how big financial institutions see profits in tacking on fees and threatening to foreclose when homeowners fall behind on property taxes. Some of the big financial institutions are operating quietly, setting…
Read MoreA Chicago Tribune investigation uncovered a pattern of harmful care at Alden Village North, a Chicago home for children and adults with developmental disabilities. Thirteen times in the last decade, residents have died under circumstances that led to state citations for neglect or failure to investigate. Instead of cracking down, regulators have allowed the problems…
Read MoreInternal emails requested by The News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.) showed that the North Carolina Department of Revenue had an undisclosed backlog of unprocessed tax returns going back to 1994 and, in thousands of cases, taxpayers were owed money for unknowingly overpaying their taxes. The e-mails also showed the department had quietly changed its policy…
Read MoreAn investigation by The Dallas Morning News found that Governor Rick Perry has given more than $16 million from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund to companies with investors or officers who are large campaign donors. The governor has denied any sort of political influence on how the tech funds are awarded.
Read MoreAn on-going series by The (Bergen, N.J.) Record looks at the effectiveness — or lack thereof — of Superfund efforts in New Jersey’s Bergen and Passaic counties. The first story in the series focuses on errors and cutbacks that have plagued the process. “Since the program was launched 30 years ago, only three of the…
Read MoreAfter HUD reviewed the local public housing authority in Lee County, Florida, The News-Press took an in-depth look at the finances and operations of this federally funded affordable housing agency. The newspaper documented instances of employees given Section 8 rent subsidy vouchers and public housing rentals ahead of needy families, kickbacks from contractors, and a…
Read MoreAccording to federal data analyzed by The Wall Street Journal, federal authorities had made no surprise inspections of deepwater oil rigs in the Gulf since 2004. Without surprise inspections, the chances of finding individual safety violations is greatly reduced. “In 2000, about one in nine inspections of deepwater facilities were unannounced, according to the Journal’s…
Read MoreAn analysis by Journal Sentinel reporters Meg Kissinger, Steve Schultze and Ben Poston has found two medical directors in charge of care at the Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex collected overtime totaling more than $300,000 at a time when federal inspectors twice declared patients there were unsafe. Overtime for Behavioral Health Division employees rose 42%…
Read MoreToxic air and school children. Deadly infections in hospitals. Dangerous care in nursing homes. Journalists tackled each of these issues last year with work that won the Philip Meyer Journalism Award. The award recognizes stories that incorporate survey research, probabilities and other social science tools in creative ways that lead to journalism vital to the…
Read MoreThere are new training videos are available on the IRE website, including free CAR training videos for IRE members. If you missed Tisha Thompson’s recent webinar that highlighted documents and data that will help you juice up your stories, it is available now. It’s only $5 for members ($10 for nonmembers). And IRE members have…
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