When investigators examined the operations of a sprawling New York social service organization, what they uncovered was deeply troubling. Board members of the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council had almost no experience in nonprofit management. Several couldn’t name any of the group’s programs. Two of them could not identify the executive director, who in turn told investigators she was unaware of a fraudulent scheme carried out under her watch: Employees had squandered or stolen most of an $80,000 city grant.

South Carolina’s legislative session came to a close Thursday with a conspicuous absence: ethics reform. While the House passed an ethics bill April 30, and the Senate appeared to be briskly moving the measure through its own legislative process, in the end the upper chamber failed to garner enough support for the bill before the session’s clock ran out.

The measure would have required that legislators begin disclosing their sources of income, while limiting independent political spending and giving an independent Ethics Commission authority to investigate complaints brought against lawmakers. But by most accounts, the bill’s defeat had little to do with its contents.

“The bill became a political soccer ball and I don’t think it was blocked because of the substance of the bill,” said John Crangle, executive director of Common Cause South Carolina.

With time running out on this year’s session, a block of conservative Republicans wanted instead to focus their energies on passing legislation to block federal health care reform in the state; that effort did not pass. Gov. Nikki Haley, a Republican, blamed Democrats for holding up the ethics bill in final days. Some Democrats have said they support the effort but want more time to vet the bill.

But the bill’s supporters say failure to pass legislation this year is only a minor setback and that they’re confident the measure will be a top priority when the legislature resumes the second half of its two-year session in January.

“It’s on special order to be the first thing we take up,” said Sen. Wes Hayes, a Republican who has been a strong proponent for tougher ethics laws.

The eldest son of South Korea’s former President Chun Doo-hwan obtained an offshore company in the Caribbean in 2004 amid a tax evasion probe into his younger brother’s alleged involvement with their father’s bribery-fed slush fund.  

Prosecutors are aggressively seeking the ex-president’s hidden assets in the face of an approaching statute of limitations deadline for his unpaid fine of 167.2 billion won ($149.3 million).

Chun Jae-kook, the oldest child of the former military strongman, became a director and shareholder of a secret company in the British Virgin Islands with the help of a law firm and an offshore services provider in Singapore, according to records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and reviewed by the Korea Center for Investigative Journalism (KCIJ), also known as Newstapa.

Chun Jae-kook, CEO of the country’s major publishing house, Sigongsa, did not respond directly to requests for comment for this story.

He released a statement saying that his offshore company had nothing to do with his father and that it was not created for evading taxes or concealing assets. He explained that his involvement in offshore came about as he moved the money he had for studying and living in the United States to Singapore when he returned to South Korea in 1989.

“I have never taken assets out of the country, and am currently holding no assets abroad,” he said.

Dictator’s Ill-gotten Wealth 

Chun Jae-kook’s 2004 acquisition of the offshore company came months after his younger brother, Chun Jae-yong, was arrested on charges of evading taxes on 16.7 billion won, money that the younger Chun said he inherited from his maternal grandfather. 

A court ruled that at least 7.3 billion won of the money came from his father’s slush fund.

This story has been updated.

When Texas’s biennial legislative session began earlier this year, many advocates for tougher ethics laws sounded an upbeat tone. Since a large crop of new lawmakers was coming aboard, some said at the time, 2013 was the year for bold reform.

But on Sunday, the legislature ended those hopes. An ethics bill was indeed passed, but it failed to include most provisions that watchdogs had pushed for. During a conference committee between the Senate and the House, lawmakers stripped several amendments that would have required online financial disclosure, exposed “dark money” in state campaigns and required lawmakers to disclose financial interests in businesses that receive state contracts.

“We’re extremely disappointed,” said Craig McDonald, director of Texans for Public Justice, a good-government group in Austin. “There were a lot of good things in there that reformers have been asking for for years, and all those were stripped in the dark of night.”

ICIJ’s investigative series on offshore secrecy — which draws from a cache of 2.5 million secret records — has ignited reactions around the globe.

Since the initial release of stories by the ICIJ and its media partners across the world, public officials have issued statements, governments have launched investigations, and politicians and journalists have been debating the implications of the records and the reporting.

Among the latest reactions and responses:

• Leaders of Britain’s overseas territories — long known as key cogs in the global tax haven system — have agreed to begin sharing tax information with other countries. 
  
  UK Prime Minister David Cameron said officials from Britain’s network of territories and dependencies have pledged to sign on to an international convention that provides for automatic exchange of information among tax authorities.

  “I commend their leadership and I look to other international partners to work with their own territories to reach similar agreements,” Cameron said.  He called the agreement a “very positive step forward” in the fight to ensure that “those who want to evade taxes have nowhere to hide.” 
  
  The British Virgin Islands, Bermuda and other UK overseas territories and dependencies also agreed to begin working to remove the veil of secrecy that often hides who owns offshore companies, Cameron said.

A little over a month ago, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) rolled out a massive piece of the 'Secrecy for Sale' investigation into offshore tax havens. Since then, the project has made waves in France, Germany, Canada, Mongolia, Sweden, Finland, The Netherlands, India, Venezuela and The Phillipines, to name (more than) a few. Stories using ICIJ's 260GB data trove ran in 47 countries, and thanks to the hard work of more than 90 journalists, the work has been cited close to 10,000 times worldwide.

The U.S., British and Australian authorities are working with a gigantic cache of leaked data that may be the beginnings of one of the largest tax investigations in history.

The secret records are believed to include those obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists that lay bare the individuals behind covert companies and private trusts in the British Virgin Islands, the Cook Islands, Singapore and other offshore hideaways.

The hoard of documents obtained by ICIJ represents the biggest stockpile of inside information about the offshore system ever gathered by a media organization.

But the British tax authority claims it has even more data.

Continue reading at ICIJ.org.

Editor's note, May 23 —A local Virginia prosecutor is examining whether Gov. Robert McDonnell violated state disclosure laws by failing to report a 2011 gift from a campaign donor. The investigation, first reported Wednesday by the Richmond Times-Dispatch, began in November at the request of Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli 

A series of revelations and stinging media reports about Virginia Gov. Robert McDonnell’s relationship with a corporate executive is bringing new attention to the state’s forgiving accountability laws — a subject highlighted last year by the State Integrity Investigation.

The root of the uproar is a $15,000 catering tab for the wedding of McDonnell’s daughter back in 2011, quietly paid by Jonnie Williams Sr., the CEO of Star Scientific, a Glen Allen, Va.-based dietary supplement company. Now the news, first reported in late March by the Washington Post, is dominating conversation in the state’s political circles and raising questions about Virginia’s liberal allowances for gifts to politicians: there is no limit.

Gov. Nathan Deal brought Georgia in line with nearly every other state in the nation Monday by signing into law the state’s first restrictions on lobbyists’ gifts to lawmakers. Deal’s action puts in place the first major piece of ethics reform Georgia has passed in decades.

Until now, lobbyists in the Peach State had been free to lavish legislators with gifts and junkets of any size. But starting next year, they’ll be forbidden from spending more than $75 per gift.

The previous lack of gift rules was one of many reasons why Georgia ranked dead last a year ago in the State Integrity Investigation, a data-driven ranking of state government accountability and transparency carried out by the Center for Public Integrity, Global Integrity and Public Radio International. In addition to its overall grade of F, Georgia received failing grades in the specific categories of lobbying disclosure and legislative accountability.

“Our success as leaders of Georgia depends heavily on the public’s ability to trust us,” Deal said in a statement after signing the gift ban along with a second bill that deals with campaign finance reporting, primarily at the local level. “Together, these bills constitute a major step in improving ethics, trust and transparency in our state.”

While advocates of tighter ethics laws hailed the legislation as a step in the right direction, the gift cap bill contains several exceptions they believe substantially weaken the provision.

“It’s like you’re starving for a meal and somebody gave you a saltine cracker,” said William Perry, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, an advocacy group.