Kentucky company making money off Georgia motorists

A private company that sells vehicle accident reports for $11 each to Georgians is making roughly $1 million a year off information that can by law be made available to drivers for less than a dollar.

Each day, police officers statewide direct hundreds of drivers involved in wrecks to a website, Buycrash.com, that belongs to a Kentucky company, Appriss Inc. The officers don’t tell motorists they can get the accident reports, needed for insurance and legal purposes, from local police agencies at little or no cost. Nor is the public likely aware that the addresses and driver’s license numbers included in the reports — personal information that could be valuable to identity thieves — is left largely unprotected.

The News-Leader raised questions then about Lakeland Behavioral Health System and posed more questions when more runaways were reported. The paper found a report that says Lakeland failed to follow Medicaid rules by repeatedly using antipsychotic drugs to restrain children.

Every day, thousands of Orange County students log in to their school-assigned Google accounts to work on lessons and send emails to teachers and classmates.

What many parents and teachers don’t know is that Google is scanning and indexing every email that those students send and receive.

The company recently disclosed how it processes the students’ emails on its computer servers in documents its lawyers filed to fight a privacy lawsuit pending in federal court in Northern California.

The federal ministry responsible for most major uniform and other clothing purchases on behalf of civil servants will begin to disclose the countries where those clothes are made.

The policy change comes after the Star questioned the oversight of companies that sell apparel to the Canadian government.

While the San Diego Opera’s overall financial condition eroded steadily over the past five years, the compensation paid to its leader Ian Campbell and his now ex-wife increased in some of those years, topping $1 million in 2010, a review of publicly filed tax forms for the organization showed.

A welder’s torch may have sparked a fire that caused $10 million in damage at the world’s largest high-security research lab, still under construction at Fort Detrick, according to a report prepared by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Delaware Chief Medical Examiner Richard T. Callery, who was suspended with pay on Feb. 25, is the subject of a criminal investigation into whether he misused state resources to run a private business, The News Journal has learned.

“No funding available” may best summarize the system for residents with developmental disabilities in Washington state, where some 14,600 families determined eligible for services don’t receive any.

In a season of cutbacks, Seattle Times reporter Christine Willmsen was surprised to see the state government proposing a budget increase.

"I noted an add-on of an addition of over $20 million, and I thought that was odd," Willmsen said.

The budget listed a line item increase for civil commitment, which is a program that allows the state to detain sexually violent predators indefinitely. It also mentioned a Washington State Supreme Court decision that would require annual civil commitment trials for violent sexual offenders. This would give the sexual offenders more opportunities to be released but potentially cost taxpayers an additional $22.5 million a year. The court decision is being reconsidered and a final decision should be given later this year, wrote Willmsen, in one of her articles.

However, before a sex offender is even deemed a "sexually violent predator" who deserves civil commitment, there is a trial. Taxpayers cover the cost for the sex offenders' numerous defense experts.

In order to find out how much taxpayers were already paying for the program, The Seattle Times and its attorney battled lawyers to obtain defense experts' invoices from the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services. To understand why particular experts were being approved Willmsen had to persuade judges to unseal court documents that listed funding approvals.

"When it was completely sealed, you had no idea what the justification was for the defense attorney hiring the psychologist," Willmsen said.

All of the documentation Willmsen gathered helped her to produce a four part series in January. Following that, legislation that had been pending was unanimously passed by the state legislature in March. The bill aims to decrease costs and centralize oversight.

Here's how Willmsen overcame obstacles during her public records quest. 

Battling the state

To get financial invoices from defense psychologists, Willmsen submitted a public records request to the Washington Department of Social and Health Services.

Originally, the department said the invoices were medical records and could not be given out. After discussions, they gave up some of the records but then notified the sex offenders and their attorneys. This gave the defense attorneys the opportunity to file a temporary restraining order, or lawsuit, that would prevent the release of the invoices.

Two public-defense associations filed a lawsuit, but The Seattle Times and its attorney proved the documents were public record and King County Superior Court Judge James Doerty ordered the release of approximately 329 pages of billing records.

Convincing judges

Accessing sealed court documents of funding approvals didn't require a public records request or going to trial but was still challenging.

"I was looking at the civil commitment cases and many (documents) were sealed by the judges, another level of secrecy that we had to fight,” Willmsen said. “I contacted the judges and kind of explained to them that I thought they had improperly sealed them."

Willmsen used Yakima County v. Yakima Herald-Republic, a previous Washington State Supreme Court decision, to convince the judges that the records were public. The decision meant, "the public had a right to see certain records of spending by public defenders," Willmsen wrote in her article "Sex offenders’ legal costs were kept secret from public."

“It’s really important to stay on top of those kinds of decisions so you can see if they are applicable to information you are seeking,” Willmsen said. 

In the end, The Seattle Times obtained 240 documents from 13 commitment cases, but Willmsen wrote, "there are likely hundreds of documents still improperly sealed in other King County civil-commitment cases."

Building the database

After negotiating for the information Willmsen still had to put together the database.

She took financial line items from PDFs that involved experts, paralegals, investigators and others and built them into an Excel sheet.

"I had to strip it out and cut and paste it," she said. "And you can imagine how long that took."

She analyzed several years back to discover who the top earners were among psychologists and experts. She also compared what the defense attorneys said they were billing for versus the experts and found it didn't match up.

"I am not sure it was intentional, I am not sure what was happening," she said, "but I am sure that the records should have reflected about the same amount for conversations and hours (billed) and it didn’t," she said.

Other tips

"If reporters want to look at this type of story in their state, thing is, is to really get an understanding of the legal process," Willmsen said. "It is a very complicated story and sometimes complicated stories take a longer time to understand."

Also, a good way to get started is to find out what kind of documentation is filed, she said.

For her story, she spoke with county and state officials to learn about the processes and get copies of the applications and forms that experts filed to get paid.

"In any story, you want to find the paper trail," Willmsen said.

 Johanna Somers is a graduate student at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

(Editor's Note: This is Part 2 of our "Behind the Story" look at coverage of the Hanford nuclear reservation's environmental issues.)

Determining when an ongoing issue becomes an issue worth investigating isn’t always easy.

Craig Welch, an environmental reporter for The Seattle Times who juggles topics from oceans to forests, also keeps his eye on the Hanford nuclear reservation, which had become, as one of his stories stated, an "atomic mess after 40 years of bomb-making."  

In Welch’s investigative stories "Big cleanup questions still loom at Hanford" and "Will giant mixers keep nuclear waste stable?" the hard part wasn’t tracking down the documents, which he said were all public. The challenge was determining which highly technical documents were important and whether employees’ complaints warranted a big story.

 "Hanford has been around for a very long time," Welch said. "It has been the subject of many government investigations."

A combination of events led Welch to decide he had a story back in January 2011, and his experience as an environmental reporter helped him decipher language from "off the charts brainy physicists and nuclear engineers." The articles in January led to another story five months later on a new federal investigation by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. 

For more than 10 years,  the Department of Energy and its lead contractor, Bechtel National, have been trying to create a facility to turn millions of gallons of nuclear waste into glass. The project costs had tripled, the completion date was extended by eight years  and journalists were starting to write about complaints from workers and watchdog groups. 

But when Walt Tamosaitis, a high-level Hanford engineer, said he had been demoted after insisting on "large-scale lab tests" to address safety concerns, Welch got curious.  

 "People started confirming his claims. A lot of it was off the record, but they were pointing me to public technical documents," Welch said.

The watchdog group Hanford Challenge also contacted Welch to tell him there was more to the story than Tamosaitis being demoted.

 "They helped me get access to documents that led me to believe it was worth looking into more," Welch said. "Up to that, there was a lot of 'he said, she said.' No one was talking about plutonium, the problems for potential for fires and explosions inside the pipes, and that is what they had been collecting documents of."

After much research, Welch was able to set the record straight.

"Hanford's waste holds up to 1,700 pounds of plutonium-239, scattered among 53 million gallons of other poisons. It is a heavy element and will want to settle at the bottom of these drums. Over time, too many particles could gather and trigger a chain reaction.

"It happened in Japan in 1999: Reprocessing-plant workers combined too much uranium. Suddenly, there was a flash of blue light and an intense surge of radiation. Two workers were vomiting within the hour. One died in 12 weeks, another in seven months."

The mixers are supposed to keep the particles moving, but they have never been used on this large of a scale or with this particular mix of chemicals and radioactive isotopes, Welch wrote. "And some of Hanford's holding vessels are installed in "black cells," areas already expected to be so hot with radioactivity that no human or equipment can get in to fix them. That means nothing must break down during decades of operation."

But before he could write such clear explanations, Welch had to locate and interpret the documents.

He used the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board’s online database, which stored  correspondence between the board and the Department of Energy. The information on the website can be very technical, he said. Unless someone is already familiar with the issues at hand, he or she will probably need expert advice.

"My personal philosophy is with stories like this you often need a jungle guide, and I had one. It’s a source in one of these government agencies that really helped me understand how these things work," Welch said.

Welch’s "jungle guide" wouldn’t go on the record.

"And I am not a big fan of going off the record, but I needed somebody who didn’t really have an ax to grind and who could really explain what these things mean. He was essential."

He also spoke with scientists from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a government research laboratory, to bounce off his understanding of how the pieces of information fit together.

These scientists, like Tamosaitis, the on the record high-ranking whistleblower, posed a small problem.  

"The whistleblower, he wanted a lot of people to understand, wanted everyone to understand," Welch said. "That wasn’t his strength. Talking to him was like talking with someone that speaks another language."

With the help of Welch’s stories, Tamosaitis and others were finally heard.

Johanna Somers is a graduate student at the University of Missouri School of Journalism