SPECIAL REPORT: High incomes in public housing

Area housing authorities are supposed to be there to help low-income families that can barely get by: single parents, the elderly and people with disabilities, News Channel 11 reports.

However after several public records requests, they found out the people who need the help the most are on lengthy waiting lists, while those who've conquered poverty are, in some cases, taking advantage of tax dollars. Overall, they found 67 housing authority households across the region that are above federal poverty guidelines. 12 families make more than $50,000 a year, one of which in Bristol, TN has lived in public housing for 17 years. Three of those take in more than $60,000 annually and one makes $76,855 a year. 

The U.S. military has erected a 64,000-square-foot headquarters in Afghanistan at a cost of $34 million, but has no plans to use it. Senior military officials told The Washington Post that they insisted they did not need the facility and see no point to moving into it as they withdraw forces from the area. Military officials told the Post the headquarters is representative of Pentagon mismanagement, which has resulted in costly projects finishing up throughought the region with no troops to use them.

Readers can search information about the ownership of more than 100,000 offshore entities in tax havens and discover the networks around them in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' Offshore Leaks Database.

Collaborative reporting between ProPublica and NPR reveals that Intuit, the company behind America's most popular tax software, TurboTax, has long fought efforts to establish an easier, free tax filing system in the U.S. Similar systems already exist in Denmwark, Spain and Sweden, and advocates for such a system say it could save millions of taxpayers a collective $2 billion in tax peparation costs.

The idea, which has at times been endorsed by both Ronald Reagan and President Obama, has also "been opposed for years by the company behind the most popular consumer tax software — Intuit, maker of TurboTax. Conservative tax activist Grover Norquist and an influential computer industry group also have fought return-free filing."