Document-driven story idea: Follow government employees to their new contractor jobs
Here's a classic document-driven story that you can do in your community: Request a list of employees from a government agency that does a lot of contracting with private companies, such as a city, state, or federal agency. Request the list for several years running. Then compare lists to see who have left the agency, and identify those who handled contracts for the agency or were in positions of authority. Then see where those folks are working to see if they are employed by companies they dealt with - and whether they facilitated deals to give tax dollars to the company. Get copies of the contracts they handled, with the official's signature or memos supporting the deal. This is a conflict of interest because it creates two issues: 1) while in government the official might have given the company a great deal in order to curry favor with the company for a sweetheart job, which hurts taxpayers, and 2) once the person is hired by the company the official might use his or her influence with the agency to get better deals, further hurting taxpayers.
So given ethics laws and government oversight, could this shady practice ever happen? Yep. Check out a just-released GAO report (08-485) that found thousands of Department of Defense employees leaving their jobs to immediately work for major government contractors that they dealt with, including Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. The GAO urges Congress to impose more oversight and transparency for preventing these questionable practices that hurt taxpayers. To conduct the study the GAO compared lists of former DOD employees to those employees' U.S. income tax returns to see where they now work. Journalists don't have access to income tax returns, so we have to work a little harder to find former officials now employed by contractors. But it can be done. In 1985 the Wall Street Journal found a former Air Force major who became a consultant for defense contractors who actually supplied classified information to the company. In 1988 the Los Angeles Times documented the corrupt relationships between officials and contractors following the Pentagon procurement scandal. This was a big story in the 1980s - a document-driven story that is an oldie but a goodie!