The Center for Public Integrity

With the future of journalism up for grabs, Investigating Power reminds us in high-definition why the world needs courageous people to produce original, independent, investigative reporting.

McCarthyism. Civil Rights. Vietnam. Watergate. Corporate power. Post 9/11.

Some of the most influential journalists of the last 60 years talk about the stories that not only shaped their careers, but shaped history as well, in a just-launched project produced by the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University and co-sponsored by the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism.

“At this critical juncture in the history of American journalism, as the news media and the nature and extent of original reporting itself undergo a very difficult transformation, we must reflect on the inherent, incalculable value of original, independent reporting in our nation and in the world,” said site creator Charles Lewis.

Open government advocates in Florida are using results from the State Integrity Investigation to push for grassroots ethics reform. The Sunshine State received a C- on its corruption risk scorecard, ranking it 18^th among the states.

Dan Krassner, executive director of Integrity Florida, said the project’s scorecards provide an easy roadmap for reform, with 330 specific policy questions and measurable outcomes.

“We looked at where our state scored the lowest,” said Krassner, who noted that Florida received its only F grade for ethics enforcement agencies.

Florida is one of about 30 states where the ethics commission is unable to self-start investigations; commissioners can only investigate citizens’ complaints. But Integrity Florida, a group that aims to promote accountability in government and expose corruption, is pushing for changes that would allow the commission to initiate its own probes.  

“That is a direct response to the State Integrity Investigation,” Krassner said. “Our organization is following up with state-level research to pass that policy reform next legislative session.”

Integrity Florida, which launched in late March, aims to inspire reform by engaging with ethics organizations and government officials, while also producing reports on potential corruption risks in the state.  A report to be released this week will highlight the lack of transparency at Florida’s economic development agency.

Even though we are serious-minded fact-checkers, we are not completely without humor, and MoveOn.org’s latest TV ad on “fat cats” and the “Buffett Rule” is pretty funny. But the ad may leave an im-purr-fect impression. One that’s off by more than a whisker.

The TV ad says, “President Obama’s Buffett Rule would require millionaires and billionaires to pay the same tax rate as the rest of us.” But on average “millionaires and billionaires” already pay more than the rest of us, and about half of them would not have to pay any additional taxes under the Paying a Fair Share Act, as the Buffett Rule is formally known.

The president’s proposal, which was rejected by the Senate on April 16, would impose a minimum 30 percent federal effective tax rate on those with adjusted gross incomes of more than $1 million. The federal effective tax rate, under the legislation, would include not just income taxes, but other federal taxes — including the employee portion of payroll taxes and the new taxes imposed on higher-income taxpayers that were contained in the health care law, effective next year.

So, we looked at the average federal effective tax rate for those earning less than $1 million — which in this TV ad would be considered “the rest of us.”

Seung-Hui Cho had a documented history of court-ordered mental health treatment, so he should have been barred from buying the guns he used to kill 32 people at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007. But five years after the shootings, a federal law designed to close the loophole Cho slipped through still hasn’t accomplished that much.

The so-called Brady Law, passed in 1993, prevented people who’d been judged mentally ill from buying firearms. Trouble is, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) established by the Brady Law hadn’t included thousands of relevant mental health records — and didn’t have any record of Cho’s treatment.

The NICS Improvement Act, signed by President George W. Bush in January 2008 — and supported by the National Rifle Association — was supposed to fix the problem by providing federal grants to help states overhaul their computer systems in order to get more mental health and other records into the NICS system. Under the 2007 law, Congress authorized $875 million over five year for this purpose, but since then only about $50 million has actually been appropriated. The results are disappointing. Published reports say two dozen states have submitted fewer than 100 mental health records to the system, and some 50 federal agencies have failed to provide records either.

A lack of access to mental health records was just one of many data gaps and loopholes that have plagued the NICS system. The litany of problems was detailed last spring by a Center for Public Integrity investigation.

AUGUSTA — Maine has paid hundreds of millions of dollars to organizations run by legislative leaders or the spouses of high-level state officials since 2003. But because of a loophole in ethics law, the public didn’t know about it.

That won’t happen again.

A bill to require disclosure of state contracts with legislators and executive branch officials has sailed to approval through the House and the Senate.

The bill, L.D. 1806, now awaits the signature of Gov. Paul LePage, who said Thursday he will sign it.

“It is reasonable to ask our elected leaders to disclose who is paying them. It is good for the health of our democracy and the people of Maine,” said LePage.

“This will increase trust in the system and ensure that people have the opportunity to take appropriate action and make decisions accordingly.”

LePage proposed the bill after a January investigation by the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting revealed that organizations run by top legislators or the family members of executive branch officials had received $235 million in state contracts between 2003 and 2010.

In some cases, lawmakers served on the committees that controlled the spending that went to their organizations.

But the spending was never disclosed to the public in state ethics filings.

Sen. Kevin Raye (R-Perry) the senate president, was the lead sponsor of LePage’s bill. He said Thursday that the bill’s passage “means a greater degree of transparency” for citizens, who will be able to spot potential legislative conflicts of interests.

“They can be more confident that they’re aware of the circumstances surrounding individual legislators and their votes in the legislature,” said Raye.

A federal judge ordered Wells Fargo to pay $3.1 million in punitive damages over its mishandling of a homeowner's loan, according to a report in the Huffington Post.

The opinion was issued by Elizabeth Magner, a federal bankruptcy judge in the Eastern District of Louisiana. Manger described Wells Fargo's behavior as "highly reprehensible" in its five-year fight with the homeowner.

The plight of the homeowner was raised in a Jan. 27 story on iWatch News. 

In an emailed statement published in the Huffiington Post, Wells Fargo spokesman Tom Goyda said "we believe that there are numerous factual and legal problems with the opinion and are reviewing our options regarding an appropriate legal response."

Meanwhile the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created by the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, is reportedly considering new rules to require lenders to provide borrowers with more information about the status of their loans.

On Saturday, April 7, 2012, one of the most extraordinary broadcast journalists in American history died at the age of 93. Mike Wallace piqued those in power for more than half a century, nowhere more famously than on the CBS News program "60 Minutes," between 1968 and 2008.

I first met Mike in 1984, when he called me out of the blue one day and asked if I had any interest in working for "60 Minutes." I had been an off-air investigative reporter at ABC News in Washington for more than six years, and I was restless. Within weeks, I had quit my job and moved my wife and daughter to the New York area. I worked as a producer for Mike Wallace at "60 Minutes" for roughly five very exciting and very difficult years, before quitting abruptly in late 1988. Why I broke a four-year contract and left — and how and why I later started the Center for Public Integrity — is a story for another day.

But my favorite investigative exposé with Mike at "60 Minutes" — and there were many great, poignant moments in which the powerful wilted under the lights and his fearless, tenacious questions — was actually my last piece as an associate producer to him, working closely with Lowell Bergman, eight years older than me, who I had met and worked with at ABC back in 1979. I proposed that we produce an investigative segment about a corrupt public school superintendent in Appalachia.