The IRE Resource Center is a major research library containing more than 23,250 investigative stories — both print and broadcast. These stories are searchable online or by contacting the Resource Center directly (573-882-3364 or rescntr@ire.org) where a researcher can help you pinpoint what you need. Browse or search the tipsheet section of our library below. Stories are not available for download but can be easily ordered by contacting the Resource Center:
Search results for "dinner parties" ...
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Dart Travel Spending
CBS 11 News reviewed thousands of pages of documents pertaining to travel expenses and credit card purchases by executives and staff members who manage Dallas Area Rapid Transit, AKA DART. We discovered dozens trips around the country and around the world for seminars. While traveling, executives enjoyed expensive accommodations. The station also found questionable expenditures on expensive catering, gift cards and purchases from Victoria's Secret. The expenses came at a time when the agency faced a $1,000,000,000 budget shortfall that jeopardized key transportation projects. CBS 11 producers followed a group of executives and board members to a transit junket in California where we watched as many skipped key meetings, attended steak dinners and parties thrown by companies who bid on transit projects. The station also watched as DART executives and staff members violated internal policies by using taxis and shuttles instead of local mass transit, a pattern found while reviewing dozens of other out-of-town junkets.
Tags: mass transit; Dallas; fraud; transit authority; travel expenses; questionable spending
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City Parties
The authors investigated two cities in their viewing area, one in Indiana and the other in Kentucky, that used taxpayers money to pay for expensive dinners, alcoholic drinks and gifts for their employees and their families.
Tags: taxpayers; city government; fraud; improper use of funds; Newport, Kentucky; Lawrenceburg,Indiana; Christmas party; inaugural party; Public Record Request
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Special Leadership Accounts
After reporters suspected a problem with two of Pennsylvania's House of Representative caucus leaders' accounts, they discovered that more than $24 million dollars were being wasted on fancy dinners and parties, campaign-style TV commercials, and flights to and from the state capital on the state plane. Using more than $120,000 from the Special Leadership Accounts, the leaders bought dinners for friends using taxpayer funds.
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Where the Party Never Ends
In These Times examines the loopholes in the gift rules that allow lawmakers to travel, eat and drink at lobbyists' expense. The story points to examples of senators and representatives receiving "education trips" to vacation spots, cheap concert tickets and free lunches. A major finding is that these dinners and junkets are important not only to the lobbyists and the organizations that pay for them . Lawmakers are dependent on the freebies, because they need the relationships with the big business in order to collect donations. "Until Congress imposes stricter campaign spending limits or implements some for of public financing of campaigns, national policy will continue to be dominated by wealthy players," the magazine reports.
Tags: subsidies; spending; federal funds; freebies; Common Cause; donations; campaign contributions; gifts
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Tis Better to Receive
Westword newspaper reports on female-only dinner clubs, in which members pay a fee to join and then move up as they get more people to join. When someone pays $5000 they become known as "soups and salads. When four soup and salad positions are filled, meaning $20000 has been raised, the 'birthday girl' gets the money. The group then splits in two, and the soups and salads move up to the 'entree level', with the two women who were previously as that level moving into the birthday spots in the two new groups; four new soups and salads then have to be created at the bottom of each group. When the birthday girls get their birthday presents, the groups split again, and so on. Before long, there are dozens of groups." Many women say this club has financially saved them, receiving money they could have otherwise never earned. But law-enforcement officials say clubs like this "are classified as illegal pyramid schemes" and members are at risk for fines and jail time if caught. Westword examines the benefits as well as the consequences of joining these kind of organizations.
Tags: dinner parties; Colorado Consumer Protection Act; member fees; money chains; pyramid schemes; gifting money; investments
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No title (id: 6883)
Oakland Press (Pontiac, Mich.) uses the Freedom of Information Act to obtain records that show school and municipal officials spending thousands of taxpayer dollars on travel, entertainment, dinner parties and posh hotel rooms, May 7-9, 1989.
Tags: None