The IRE office will be closed from December 25th to January 5th.
Government (federal/state/local)
U.S. contracts fund Taliban-affiliated insurgents
Aram Roston of The Nation reports hundreds of millions of American tax dollars are going directly to Taliban-affiliated insurgents in Afghanistan. According to the article, US military officials in Kabul estimate the U.S. pays about 10 percent of the Pentagon’s logistics contracts to insurgents. One source told Roston the payments are necessary “because none of…
Read MoreStimulus job reports riddled with errors, inflated numbers
“A stimulus job report that says more than 10,000 jobs were saved or created in Wisconsin is rife with errors, double counting and inflated numbers based more on satisfying federal formulas than creating real jobs,” according to a report by Ben Poston of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. One of the problems is linked to cases…
Read MoreFelon awarded $1 million to supply AIDS/HIV services
In the third part of “Wasting Away,” an investigation of D.C.’s AIDS program,The Washington Post found the city awarded a $1 million AIDS contract to a woman who had just been convicted in federal court for a mortgage fraud scheme that bilked lenders out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Over three years, the city…
Read MoreGambling with state pension plan may cost state jobs, services
Mackenzie Ryan of the Statesman Journal (Salem, Ore.) recently investigated a new and controversial financial strategy in Oregon that attempts to lower a public agency’s pension system. The arbitrage strategy – where cities, school districts and the state issued bonds and then invested the money – made pension costs more volatile because “an agency’s pension…
Read MoreJobs linked to aircraft production complicate attempted budget cuts
The Boeing C-17 is a $250 million aircraft used by the military to transport troops and supplies. Despite the Pentagon asserting it has plenty of C-17s in its fleet, Congress continues to approve funding for additional planes, according to a report by Ben Elgin and Keith Epstein of BusinessWeek. The 2010 budget has $2.5 billion…
Read MoreClean energy stimulus funds ending up overseas
The latest report from the Investigative Reporting Workshop at the American University shows that the majority of clean-energy grants paid out from stimulus funds have gone to overseas companies. “Of the $1.05 billion in clean-energy grants handed out by the government since Sept. 1, 84 percent – a total of $849 million – has gone…
Read MoreNonprofit a source of ready money for city officials
A Baltimore Sun investigation reveals that a little-known private nonprofit group formed to primarily benefit city programs for the underprivileged is a source of money-on-demand for city government officials with almost no oversight. City employees wield broad discretion over how money is spent from the Baltimore City Foundation and the foundation asks few questions. The…
Read MoreRulings by California’s worker safety appeals board questioned
A Los Angeles Times investigation found that the Cal-OSHA Appeals Board “has repeatedly reduced or dismissed penalties levied by Cal-OSHA over the last few years, even in situations in which workers have died or been seriously injured.” Inspectors and labor advocates are critical of the board claiming that repeatedly appealing penalties undermines Cal-OSHA’s ability to…
Read MoreQuestionable individuals retain U.S. pilots licenses
Analysis of a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) database made available to ABCNews.com showed that “a notorious drug kingpin, a convicted arms trafficker and several other individuals linked to aviation-connected crimes continue to hold FAA pilots licenses,” according to a report by Eric Longabardi and Joseph Rhee. The findings raise questions in the efforts of the…
Read MoreWasting Away series
In a city ravaged by the highest rate of AIDS case in the nation, the D.C. Health Department paid millions to nonprofit groups that delivered substandard services or failed to account for any work at all, even as sick people searched for care or died waiting. A ten-month Washington Post investigation found AIDS money was…
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