Even if life for Wall Street firms gets easier with the Republican takeover of the House, they shouldn't expect any letup from New York's new top prosecutor, reports the Wall Street Journal. Eric Schneiderman, the Democrat elected as New York attorney general, said yesterday he was developing plans to investigate the debt and mortgage markets that target consumers. "Cracking down on bad apples is good for the market and the people on Wall Street who play by the rules," he said.
The six-term New York state senator from Manhattan's Upper West Side built his campaign for attorney general partly on a promise to continue in the footsteps of predecessors Andrew Cuomo and Eliot Spitzer, who aggressively prosecuted corruption on Wall Street. Schneiderman described the job as being the "sheriff" of Wall Street, and he is close to Cuomo, who was elected New York's governor. While federal prosecutors spend years building cases, the New York Attorney General is known for responding quickly and loudly. Unlike other state attorneys general, New York's can pursue both criminal and civil penalties with nationwide reach. The state law defines securities fraud broadly and doesn't require prosecutors to prove intent.
Read full entry »The Justice Department announced the arrests of nearly 500 people in what it billed as a nationwide "takedown" of mortgage scams, many of them directed at homeowners in financial distress, the Wall Street Journal reports. Federal and state authorities in the past three months have seized or recovered for victims more than $200 million in a range of criminal and civil cases. Officials have identified losses of $2.3 billion stemming from hundreds of mortgage-fraud cases. "The breadth of the fraud is truly astonishing," said Attorney General Eric Holder.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation said suspicious-activity reports of mortgage fraud referred to law enforcement by financial institutions rose by 5 percent in fiscal 2009 (http://www.fbi.gov/publications/fraud/mortgage_fraud09.htm). The FBI has devoted more resources to tackling the problem. The number of FBI investigations into alleged mortgage frauds more than doubled, to more than 3,000 this year from around 1,200 in fiscal year 2007. The Obama administration is under pressure to hold bankers and financial institutions accountable for actions that may have contributed to the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression. In November, President Barack Obama set up the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force to coordinate federal, state and local efforts to prosecute financial misconduct.
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A new report from the Center on Court Innovation examines how record foreclosures and mortgage fraud are impacting public safety, including rises in crime and homelessness, as well as strain on local resources. The report looks at communities hit hard by the housing crisis, including Dallas, Baltimore, Indianapolis and Indio, California.
Click here to read the full report.
Photo by TheTruthAbout... via Flickr.
Read full entry »Arizona will get nearly $2 million in federal money this year to combat mortgage scammers that experts say helped push the state into a housing bust and can hinder its recovery, the Arizona Republic reports. That means the state, described by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder as one of the national mortgage-fraud "epicenters," is tagged to get almost a quarter of the nearly $8 million being distributed for the task in the federal government's fiscal 2010 budget. "Mortgage fraud must be stopped in its tracks," Holder said.
Holder spoke yesterday at a mortgage-fraud summit in Phoenix after a string of appraisers, lenders, real-estate attorneys, law enforcement officials and others talked about errors that led to the housing bubble and possible ways to keep it from happening again. They said the housing crash has not chased scammers out of the market - they are simply running new scams. One of the worst, they said, is phony loan-modification companies. They placed blame on all sides: appraisers, bankers, mortgage companies. Mark Tronziger, president of the Arizona Association of Mortgage Brokers, said it was so easy to get a mortgage during the bubble that there was a joke about being able to get a loan if you could "fog a mirror."
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On April 1 and April 2, 2009, the Center on Media, Crime and Justice and McCormick Foundation hosted a specialized reporting institute, "How Do they get Away With it? Tracking Financial Crime in the New Era."
Twenty-One fellows from around the country joined panelists and speakers such as: Patrick Carroll, Supervisory Special Agent, FBI, New York Office, Sam Antar, Former CFO, Fast Eddie's, Peter Turecek, Senior Managing Director, Business Intelligence & Investigations, Kroll and Walter Ricciardi, Former SEC Deputy Chief, Division of Enforcement.
Access the program brochure here.
Researchers at John Jay College compiled a research guide of the most relevant contacts in the financial industry. Download a copy of the guide.
Before the sub-prime crisis captured national attention, a reporter for The Charlotte Observer noticed a strange pattern while compiling a list of foreclosed homes in North Carolina’s Mecklenburg County -- clusters were concentrated in new developments and they wondered if faulty loans were behind the trend.
The year-long investigation led to The Charlotte Observer’s four-part series, “ Sold a Nightmare.” Lawmakers in North Carolina passed new mortgage regulations in response to the series and federal and criminal investigations of Beazer are underway.
Understand how the reporters investigated this fraud. Read the case study here.
Read live blogging from the conference.
Articles by conference fellows:
MSNBC
"Regulators Struggle to Contain Foreclosure Fraud" by John W. Schoen
SACRAMENTO BEE
"Ponzi Schemes Flourish with Vulnerable Victims, Underfunded Watchdogs" by Andrew McIntosh
"Ponzi Scheme Perpetrators Exploit Some Common Misperceptions" by Andrew McIntosh
Graphic: "Red Flags for Ponzi Schemes" by Andrew McIntosh
"Massive real estate losses hidden at California bank " by Andrew McIntosh
"Jerry Brown donations tied to businessmen" by Andrew McIntosh
"$2 million settles kickback " by Andrew McIntosh
"Brown returns $52,500 to donors" by Andrew McIntosh
VOICES OF SAN DIEGO
"A Staggering Swindle: How Could it Happen in 2008?" by Kelly Bennett and Will Carless
BLOOMBERG
"Stanford Coaxed $5 billion as SEC Weighed Powers" by Alison Fitzgerald and Michael Forsythe
Appearances/Articles
Professor William Black (panelist) discussing financial fraud on the Bill Moyers Journal and interviewed in Barrons.
Panelist William D. Cohan, author of "House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street" interviewed by The Crime Report.
Conference Handouts:
Resource Guide: Reporting on Financial Crime
Case Study: The Charlotte Observer
Prof. William Black Power Point: Accounting Fraud
More Reporting Resources (generously submitted by panelist Elaine Carey, Senior VP of Control Risks)
The lobbyist database from the Center for Responsive Politics (OpenSecrets) is great and easy to use. It links directly to pdf filings and lets you see if someone is a registered lobbyist, who they are registered with, and who they lobby. You can also see how much they make from each client.
The Environmental Working Group’s farm subsidy database is a great way of calling out politicians who complain about “government handouts” and then take tons of money in farm subsidies for their ranches and farms.
People frequently don’t think about state donations, but they can be incredibly important when looking to see if someone is buy influence at the state level. The National Institute on Money in State Politics is a great way to start when looking to see if someone is giving a ton at this level. You should always check out the state’s own website too, as they sometimes have more complete information.
The Federal Register lets you see copies of notices and actions published by federal agencies - helpful when looking to see if someone has been sanctioned, for instance.
FedSpending.org lets you see what groups have received federal grants and contracts.
The EPA has a good website that lets you check to see if a company/facility is EPA compliant or if there have been any enforcement actions taken against it.
WikiFOIA is a website that compiles information about open records availability en each state. It can help you find out what information is available and links to a “letter generator” for each state that conforms to that state’s open records laws.
The Center for Public Integrity compiles financial disclosure statements for state legislators. This is a good way to see who they’ve worked for, where they hold directorships, what they hold stock in, etc. It also has a rundown of various disclosure requirements for different states.
Video from the Conference
Video 1: Did white collar crime and fraud trigger the economic meltdown?
Video 2: Were regulators asleep?
Video 3: Did journalists miss the story?
Read full entry »Turning its attention to bigger fish in the subprime mortgage scandal, the Justice Department is investigating whether lenders or Wall Street firms defrauded investors in the sale of risky mortgage securities, reports McClatchy Newspapers. "We absolutely are looking at the conduct of the securitizers themselves, and what did they say to those who purchased the (securities)," Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer told a commission created by Congress to investigate causes of the nation's economic collapse.
Breuer didn't identify any company under scrutiny. Wall Street's biggest investment banks bought many of the $2 trillion in home mortgages issued to shaky borrowers, converted them to high-yield bonds, and sold the bonds to investors including pension funds, insurers, and foreign banks. Many of the securities have since defaulted, and investors have lost billions of dollars.
Read full entry »A leading cause of the foreclosure deluge that has swamped Tampa Bay's housing market is mortgage fraud, so it was welcome news in November when federal prosecutors announced they had nailed some of the culprits, says the St. Petersburg Times. A nine-month investigation nabbed more than 100 defendants and 700 properties. "Mortgage fraud will not be tolerated," said U.S. Attorney A. Brian Albritton. But of the 22 cases that were disclosed, none involves the kind of major fraud that helped crash the U.S. economy. They name 29 people who are accused mostly of minor scams, such as individual borrowers lying on loan applications.
The gap between those charged so far and the amount of remaining fraud is a hangover from a decision made by the U.S. Department of Justice after the Sept. 11 attacks. The FBI shifted 1,800 agents from criminal cases to national security. In 2008, as the housing market collapsed, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Tampa managed only four mortgage fraud cases. The Justice Department has since made mortgage fraud a priority, but it won't be easy playing catchup, said University of Southern California law Prof. Rebecca Lonergan, a former federal prosecutor. "If they haven't been focusing on mortgage fraud, they won't know who the real actors are," she said. "So when they want to make a point all of a sudden with a sweep, they won't get big cases. You don't get those unless investigators have been paying attention for a while."
Read full entry »Federal law enforcement officials in Nevada are launching a major offensive against mortgage fraud, with the FBI preparing hundreds of complex cases for prosecution against operators who have preyed on Las Vegas’ still-staggering boom-and-bust real estate market, reports the Las Vegas Sun. A special mortgage fraud squad is assembling evidence in 300 cases, many of them involving a million dollars or more in ill-gotten gains. Agents have identified about 500 people connected to some 85 illegal organizations who lied on loan applications or manipulated financial documents to defraud lending institutions and property owners.
One FBI agent said the cases are “mushrooming fast.” He compared them to complex drug investigations where “we talk to one person and flip him, and that leads us deeper into these operations.” Asked to describe the magnitude of the investigations, he said, “We have cases with a lot of fingers going in a lot of directions. It’s beginning to be like shooting fish in a barrel.”
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Crime Reporting Case Study: Mortgage Fraud
Deborah Potter, NewsLab
“This was happening all over and everybody was in on the scheme.”
--Patrick Scott, business editor, The Charlotte Observer
For years, it seemed the sky was the limit for real estate in Charlotte, N.C. The second largest U.S. banking center after New York City was one of the nation’s fastest growing areas in the early 2000s. But the boom in home sales was driven in part by subprime loans that resulted in a wave of foreclosures.
In 2007, a year-long investigation by The Charlotte Observer found the surge in foreclosures “had as much to do with the builder as it did the borrower,” said business editor Patrick Scott.
The builder was Atlanta-based Beazer Homes USA, at the time one of the ten largest home builders in the country. The newspaper found it had aggressively sold starter homes in the Charlotte area to low income buyers in ways that made a high rate of foreclosures inevitable. A Beazer subsidiary arranged larger loans than many buyers could afford and sold homes for more than they were worth. The paper uncovered falsified mortgage documents and apparent violations of federal law, as well as federal and state lending rules.
The sales strategy was a financial success for the home builder, the paper reported, but the new neighborhoods fell apart. At the time the series ran, almost one in five buyers in Beazer’s Southern Chase subdivision had lost their homes to foreclosure, more than six times the national rate.
That neighborhood was not an exception. The paper’s investigation found that in dozens of newly-built developments of low-priced homes around Charlotte, foreclosure rates were 20 percent or higher.
“Prices fell. Renters moved in. Crime sometimes rose,” the paper reported. “But as the foreclosures piled up, authorities were unaware.” The investigation revealed that no one was tracking foreclosures at that time—not the city, the county, the state or the federal government.
“Nobody ever had shown the public officials that there’s an issue here that needs to be recognized, and a problem in the growth of Charlotte, which has been pretty lax in any sort of regulation,” said Scott.
“We knew immediately that we had written something profoundly powerful,” said lead reporter Binyamin Appelbaum. “What was less clear for a while was what difference it was going to make.”
Faces of foreclosure
The newspaper’s four-part series, Sold a Nightmare, put a human face on the subprime meltdown as it pinpointed who was to blame. Beazer marketed its homes at apartment complexes, taking people like 20-year-old maintenance worker Chris Wood on tours of its new developments.
“I went in thinking, ‘I don’t make enough money. I’m making $9 an hour,’ ” Wood recalled.
He was startled when a Beazer employee told him he could afford a home. He borrowed $500 from his grandmother to make the deposit.
As it turned out, he didn’t make enough money. Wood’s final loan application misstated his income and debts. Without the misstatements, he did not appear to meet FHA’s requirements for the loan he needed.
He was suddenly spending 45 percent of his income on debt payments each month. He was in trouble almost instantly.
While the paper repeatedly noted that buyers like Wood share responsibility for loans they accept, the series “explored how the bad actors operate,” said database editor Ted Mellnik, who developed an interactive online map of the neighborhood that vividly illustrated the scope of the problem. The map highlighted every foreclosed home in the Southern Chase neighborhood and linked to background information and a photograph.
“What I liked about that map was it really let people visualize this neighborhood and see what kind of houses they are, and kind of in a way see what kind of people they are,” Mellnik said. “People could see this isn’t a crummy slum somewhere and this should be sort of a normal neighborhood.”
The online package also included video profiles of two couples who owned homes at Southern Chase. “They were really critical to hearing the stories of the homeowners and seeing…how these people really were bright, average, ordinary people,” said business editor Patrick Scott, “It’s not like [Rick Santelli of CNBC] on the floor of the stock exchange talking about loser homeowners who took on the bad loans knowing that they shouldn’t have. This wasn’t the case.”
Impact
The series provoked an immediate outcry from local and state officials. “There was a tremendous amount of outrage about the facts we were reporting,” Appelbaum said. During the reporting process, however, “the FBI had made it very clear to us they were not interested in mortgage fraud, they were busy preventing terrorism,” he said; the US attorney for the Western District of North Carolina[Preferred1] was equally uninterested. After the stories ran, federal and state agencies announced investigations.
“The FBI basically told us that they were investigating this because they couldn’t ignore it,” Appelbaum said. “We had detailed a case that was so blunt and clear in its particulars and massive in its implications that they had to deal with it.”
North Carolina wound up passing legislation “ensuring that lenders can’t make loans without understanding whether the people have the ability to pay them,” said Scott.
Beazer eventually admitted that some employees had violated federal lending rules and got out of the mortgage lending business. The company fired its chief accounting officer for attempting to destroy documents.[i] It remains under investigation by the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Housing and Urban Development for possible criminal violations. The North Carolina Real Estate Commission is also investigating the company's lending practices.
“It’s always extremely gratifying when you can do a project that is a public service that has a wide reach and a broad scope and you did before almost every other newspaper in the nation,” Mellnik said.
“We surprised some people,” said reporter Lisa Hammersly, who also worked on the series. “It woke some people up. I don’t think enough change came out of it, but it may yet. It’s not over.”
How they did it
“Sold a Nightmare” was the third major housing investigation The Charlotte Observer had published in less than three years. In 2005, the paper discovered that minorities were more likely than whites to get risky, high-priced loans. The next year, the paper looked at the result: a pattern of foreclosures never seen before, concentrated in brand new suburban neighborhoods built for lower-income buyers. The unanswered question was, why?
“We knew there was something smelly going on,” said Mellnik. “It was just a question of whether it could be nailed down.”
Appelbaum, one of the Observer’s banking reporters, worked alone on the project for months while also reporting other stories. He knew he was onto something criminal very early on, after seeing that one Southern Chase homeowner’s income had been inflated on his final loan application. “That was mortgage fraud plain and clear,” Appelbaum said. “Who was guilty was a different question.
“My concern was to build up a pattern of evidence that would show that this had happened broadly and systematically and that people had been taken advantage of.”
Eventually, Appelbaum was assigned to the project full time, with help from Mellnik and Hammersly. To nail down the numbers, they examined county property records, building permits, court bankruptcy records and Federal Housing Administration data. Mellnik created a map of Southern Chase by “scraping” data from county government Web sites, including photos of each house, parcel maps and an ArcView shapefile. Appelbaum and Hammersly also spent countless hours in Southern Chase.
“Much of the information you need is not in public records at all, either print or electronic,” Appelbaum said. “You had to knock on enough doors and convince enough people to trust you with their personal, confidential financial records and you had to know what you were looking for when you got those records, and you had to believe it was worth doing that 200, 400, 600 times before you were sure you saw a pattern.”
Just seeing a pattern wasn’t enough, Hammersly said. “When you can gather the documents, then what you need is sound experts who can walk you through it, look at the documents and say, ‘Here’s a problem,” Hammersly said. “It took some looking to find people willing to do it.”
The reporters consulted forensic appraisal experts as well as the state banking commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. “You have to look at who the regulators are [and talk to them],” said Hammersly. “The banks did not want to talk about what it was like to be left on the hook.”
Getting through to Beazer was even more difficult. The company insisted Southern Chase was just an aberration, so the paper collected data showing that half the builder’s other neighborhoods around Charlotte had even higher foreclosure rates. “They stopped talking to us after that,” said Scott.
By the time the series was ready for publication, the Observer team had grown to 20, including researchers, photographers and designers. The project included eight stories, which ran over four days, along with buyer profiles and “how to” information that Appelbaum described as “a guide to the perplexed, a set of instructions for helping yourself.”
Using graphics and break-out boxes, the paper explained in simple terms how no-money-down loans and teaser rates can hurt buyers, and how foreclosures damage people and neighborhoods. “We used the pages inside to do explanatory journalism on a really confusing thing,” said Scott, “trying to break this down into components that were clear and meaningful.”
Next steps
Foreclosures in many other areas have been well documented by journalists since the Observer’s series ran. But[Preferred2] the Charlotte journalists believe there is still fertile ground to be explored.
FHA lending
Low-down-payment mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration account for nearly a third of all mortgage loans now being made, according to an investigation by The Washington Post, which found signs that the program is being seriously abused.[ii]
“That agency is really ill equipped to be providing or backing and overseeing loans,” said Scott.
The toll of foreclosures
When a community is riddled with foreclosures, “the pain is just extraordinary,” said Hammersly. She urged reporters to examine the issues on an extremely local level. “The closest look in your own neighborhood can be more telling that all the ‘suits’ holding news conferences across the country.”
For Appelbaum, the important question is what happens next to communities like Southern Chase all over the country, and to the people who live there[Preferred3] . “Those are now our new slums, our new forgotten places,” he said. “There’s a real chance the solution to this crisis is just to walk away from too many of those people and it’s a topic that deserves more coverage than it’s gotten.”
Access a resource guide on mortgage foreclosures
The Utah Attorney General's Office is "sounding the alarm" that any further budget cuts will affect its ability to investigate and prosecute some types of crimes, leaving victims without justice, reports the Deseret News. Kirk Torgensen, chief deputy Utah attorney general, said the crisis happened when legislators cut additional funding the office needed to handle a "mind-boggling" influx of mortgage fraud cases.
Torgensen said the agency has typically taken on complex white-collar investigations that can take up to nine months to complete before determining whether charges are warranted. That amount of work has the potential to overwhelm local police agencies and county attorneys, he added. "The attorney general's office has often filled that vacuum. It's something we've done with pride," Torgensen said. "Now we haven't got the resources to go after all the requests we are getting."
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The woes of civil legal aid, traditionally underfunded and restricted, has added to the wave of foreclosures blanketing poor Americans, especially in the African-American and Latino communities, reports a new study by the Brennan Center for Justice. The report argues that these foreclosures are a "crisis in the legal" community.
Read the report here.
Use The Crime Report for more information on Foreclosures.
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A new report by the FBI found escalating instances of mortgage fraud in 2008. Mortgage fraud filings from financial institutions rose 36 percent, from 46,717 in 2007 to 63,713 in 2008, with more than half the cases involving losses of more than $1 million. There is no central database of mortgage fraud complaints, but the report states that "virtually all law enforcement and industry statistics indicated an upswing in mortgage fraud activity" and predicts that "several of these schemes have the potential to spread if the current economic downward trend, as expected, continues into 2009 and beyond."
Click here to read the full report.
Use The Crime Report for more information on Mortgage Fraud and White-Collar Crime.
Read full entry »Resources for tracking financial crime, including material from the McCormick Foundation/John Jay Specialized Reporting Institute on Financial Crime, 2009.
Read full entry »The Justice Department, Secret Service, and U.S. Postal Service have a half a billion dollars in new funding authority to investigate and prosecute individuals and companies suspected of mortgage fraud under legislation signed May 20 by President Obama, the Washington Post reports. The targets range from people who lie about their incomes on home mortgage applications to highly organized roving networks of "foreclosure relief" scammers who bilk money out of homeowners seeking mortgage modifications.
Known as the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009, the legislation would fund new SWAT teams of fraud-busters and broaden federal legal powers to go after individuals and mortgage operations that currently get attention -- if at all -- only at the state or local levels. (Funding authority may or may not translate into actual funding.) The law also creates a Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission with broad powers to investigate who and what got us into the real estate mess, starting with the subprime boom, Wall Street hanky-panky and more recent bank failures. The Treasury Department estimates that mortgage fraud causes losses of $15 billion to $25 billion a year to consumers and the mortgage industry. The FBI's mortgage fraud caseload has tripled in the past three years.
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Lydia Rosner, Danny Kessler and Panelist Sam Antar; Photo by John Martin, of the Columbia School of Journalism
On April 1-2, 2009, the McCormick Foundation and John Jay Center on Media, Crime and Justice held a two day Specialized Reporting Institute on covering financial crimes. Entitled "How Do They Get Away With It? Tracking Financial Crime in the New Era," the conference and workshops featured panelists including former SEC regulators, FBI agents, economics professors and even a white-collar crook.
Below are resources from the conference, including links to The Crime Report's live-blogging of both days, articles by conference fellows, case studies and materials handed out to attendees. Stay tuned for more photos and video of the event.
Live-Blogging the Conference: Day 1 and Day 2
Articles by conference fellows:
MSNBC
"Regulators Struggle to Contain Foreclosure Fraud" by John W. Schoen
SACRAMENTO BEE
"Ponzi Schemes Flourish with Vulnerable Victims, Underfunded Watchdogs" by Andrew McIntosh
"Ponzi Scheme Perpetrators Exploit Some Common Misperceptions" by Andrew McIntosh
Graphic: "Red Flags for Ponzi Schemes" by Andrew McIntosh
VOICES OF SAN DIEGO
"A Staggering Swindle: How Could it Happen in 2008?" by Kelly Bennett and Will Carless
BLOOMBERG
"Stanford Coaxed $5 billion as SEC Weighed Powers" by Alison Fitzgerald and Michael Forsythe
ROCHESTER DEMOCRAT AND CHRONICLE
"County Probe Widens Into Politics" by Gary Craig
THE CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER
"Ponzi Schemes Seem to Proliferate in Tough Economic Times" by Alison Grant
Appearances/Articles
Professor William Black (panelist) discussing financial fraud on the Bill Moyers Journal and interviewed in Barrons.
Panelist William D. Cohan, author of "House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street" interviewed by The Crime Report.
Conference Resources:
Resource Guide: Reporting on Financial Crime
Case Study: The Charlotte Observer
Prof. William Black Power Point: Accounting Fraud
More Reporting Resources (generously submitted by panelist Elaine Carey, Senior VP of Control Risks)
The lobbyist database from the Center for Responsive Politics (OpenSecrets) is great and easy to use. It links directly to pdf filings and lets you see if someone is a registered lobbyist, who they are registered with, and who they lobby. You can also see how much they make from each client.
The Environmental Working Group’s farm subsidy database is a great way of calling out politicians who complain about “government handouts” and then take tons of money in farm subsidies for their ranches and farms.
People frequently don’t think about state donations, but they can be incredibly important when looking to see if someone is buy influence at the state level. The National Institute on Money in State Politics is a great way to start when looking to see if someone is giving a ton at this level. You should always check out the state’s own website too, as they sometimes have more complete information
The Federal Register lets you see copies of notices and actions published by federal agencies - helpful when looking to see if someone has been sanctioned, for instance.
FedSpending.org lets you see what groups have received federal grants and contracts.
The EPA has a good website that lets you check to see if a company/facility is EPA compliant or if there have been any enforcement actions taken against it.
WikiFOIA is a website that compiles information about open records availability en each state. It can help you find out what information is available and links to a “letter generator” for each state that conforms to that state’s open records laws.
The Center for Public Integrity compiles financial disclosure statements for state legislators. This is a good way to see who they’ve worked for, where they hold directorships, what they hold stock in, etc. It also has a rundown of various disclosure requirements for different states.
Read full entry »
