WFAA-TV’s 19-part series State of Denial details questionable practices by state agencies and major insurance companies involved with the Texas workers compensation system. The series detailed possible fraud and potentially unethical practices by a number of major insurance companies, activities ignored or unpunished by regulators. Since the series began, Texas Workers’ Compensation Commission Chairman, Richard Smith, resigned, and Executive Director Richard Reynolds retired. A state panel recommended that the Texas Workers’ Compensation Commission be abolished and a special office set up to ensure injured workers be provided swift, adequate care.
The Empty Promise of an Equal Defense
Unnecessary Epidemic
Blind into Baghdad
Wired for Waste
In 1998, Atlanta, like many other American cities, was made the beneficiary of a federal E-rate program to provide poor children with access to the internet. In the six years since the program began almost $13 billion was gathered for this purpose, and as reporting by Paul Donsky and Ken Foskett of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution revealed, Atlanta took its share of the money and ran with it, literally.
Atlanta Public Schools misspent or mismanaged nearly $73 million, overpaying for a lavish computer network that cost taxpayers millions more to run and maintain. The district spent money without requiring bids for the best price, with little oversight from the school board members and few questions from the check writers in Washington who subsidized the work. At one elementary school, equipment powerful enough to operate a small school district was installed to support just 20 computers. At another, Atlanta billed the program for electronics for twice as many classrooms as the school had. Officials applied for and received millions for schools they knew they were going to close within a few years. Elsewhere, boxes of costly computer equipment, some still wrapped in plastic, gathered dust in storage.
As a result of the investigation, the federal pipeline to Atlanta Public Schools went dry, and in 2007, Arthur Scott, the former APS technical director who ran the district’s E-rate program, was sentenced to 37 months in federal prison for accepting nearly $300,000 in bribes from vendors.
Captive Clientele
Henriques exposed a trail of deceit through which thousands of American soldiers were sold misleading insurance policies, often by former military officials who were operating with the knowledge, if not the approval, of the Pentagon. Her reporting revealed how former military officers were allowed by base commanders to make formal, official looking presentations to financially inexperienced soldiers headed off to war. Soldiers were sold insurance policies at ten, twenty, even fifty times more than the insurance provided by the federal government. As she dug deeper, Henriques found complicity from the top for all kinds of deceptive tactics, all designed to trade on the presumption of the soldiers that they would not be cheated by their own. She showed too, how in the face of pressure from big financial interests, the military brass would cave, in one case abandoning the investigation of a big financial company whose products and sales practices were suspect. The impact of Henriques’ reporting was fast and powerful, resulting in new laws, refunds and the like.
Friends in High Places: Perks of Power
Phil Williams and Bryan Staples of WTVF-TV, Nashville, TN, focused on the unethical conduct of many Tennessee public officials, including the then-president of the University of Tennessee.
Big Green
The Washington Post exposed wayward practices by the Nature Conservancy, the nation’s largest private environmental group.
The Senators’ Sons
Los Angeles Times exposed how some U.S. Senators’ abuse of special interest groups accrue hundreds of thousands of dollars for family members acting as lobbyists and consultants.
Profiting from Public Service
Gannett New Jersey Newspapers shed light on the abuse of power by some New Jersey Legislators for the benefit of their family and friends.
