Randy ‘Duke’ Cunningham

Reporting by Stern and Kammer led to the resignation of Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-CA) after they revealed Cunningham had taken $2.4 million in bribes.

State of Denial

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.

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.