The Center for Public Integrity

Rhode Island garnered a respectable ninth in the nation ranking from the State Integrity Investigation in late March, but that was before elimination of the state’s internal auditing agency was proposed as part of the governor’s  budget.  

Rhode Island’s Chief Auditor, H. Chris Der Vartanian,  announced his resignation Wednesday in the wake of Gov. Lincoln Chafee’s plan to cut the Bureau of Audits, citing the state’s ranking as a reason to keep the independent auditing arm in place.

“Ironically, this proposed elimination comes at a time when the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) one of the country’s oldest and largest nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organizations categorized the Bureau as one of the highest performing state internal audit agencies in the country and one of the major factors leading to the state of Rhode Island achieving a ranking of [9^th] in the nation in terms of preventing corruption,”  Der Vartanian  wrote in a resignation letter to Gov. Chafee and Richard Licht, the director of administration.

Rhode Island received a B+ in internal auditing on its corruption risk scorecard. It received its highest grade, an A, for redistricting, and scored its lowest, an F, on state civil service management.  The state’s overall grade was C.  

Der Vartanian, who worked in state government for 21 years, said he thought it was important for public officials to review the report card to determine what policies need improvement.

The U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday announced it had opened multiple investigations into how local authorities and school officials handled a series of recent sexual assault allegations at the University of Montana. The adjudication of sexual assault cases on college campuses was the subject of a series of stories by the Center for Public Integrity.

Questions involving the handling of sexual assault cases have engulfed the university and its hometown of Missoula since late last year, when the school announced it had hired an outside investigator to look into allegations that two university students were drugged and gang-raped in December. That probe eventually grew to include other cases; the Justice Department said that at least 11 reported sexual assaults involving UM students had occurred in an 18-month period. The university faced criticism for how it handled the cases, as did the Missoula Police department and the county attorney. Several of the cases involve allegations against players for the school’s popular and successful football team, the Grizzlies. The university fired the school’s athletic director and head football coach in late March.

In the past five years, Massachusetts residents have been forced to witness an embarrassing parade of fallen public servants caught up in corrupt acts, handcuffed and led away. Their names still prompt a wince: Finneran, DiMasi, Wilkerson, Turner, Marzilli and more. The scandals’ cost to the public purse is untold; the cost to public confidence in government leadership incalculable.

Yet the overwhelming majority of public servants embroiled in criminal or ethical scandals since 2007 are people most in Massachusetts have never heard of. They draw their paychecks far from power centers like Beacon Hill or city halls, but in small town schools and libraries, municipal police and fire stations, in local housing projects, on rural postal routes, in state prisons, county jails and courthouses dotting the Bay State. From a former Springfield school teacher accused of insurance fraud to a Lawrence police officer charged with rape to a Dighton town official sanctioned for hiring his relatives, hundreds of ordinary individuals paid to serve the public interest have been charged with or admitted to crimes and ethical misconduct in Massachusetts, according to a new analysis by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting.

The NECIR compilation of public servants accused of crimes or ethical misconduct was culled over the past several months from news reports, agency press releases, state and federal court records, Ethics Commission dispositions, government annual reports and interviews with municipal, state and federal officials.  

Citing the state’s F grade for redistricting in the State Integrity Investigation, Common Cause/NY filed an amicus brief earlier this week supporting a challenge to the constitutionality of New York’s newly-drawn 63^rd Senate district.

“The entire process was tremendously opaque,” said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause/NY. “It is a very discouraging for the average citizen to see the state carved up in districts as a result of political negotiations behind closed doors.”

The Common Cause brief supports a lawsuit brought by New York Senate Democrats who claim that Senate Republicans, currently the majority, manipulated the state constitution’s population counting formula – used every 10 years to determine the size of the Senate –  to their advantage. The lawsuit alleges that Senate Republicans  applied two different methods of calculating census growth in different  counties,  allowing them to manipulate the numbers to give them an extra seat in Republican upstate New York.

The lawsuit was dismissed by the state Supreme Court on April 13. The court ruled that increasing the size of the state Senate was not unconstitutional, but found the use of different counting methods “disturbing.” A spokesman for Senate Republicans said “we were required to add a 63^rd seat to comply with the Constitution.” Democrats appealed to the Court of Appeals, New York’s highest court, and arguments are set for today.  

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.