Official misconduct is the subject of most investigative projects. Reporters have a keen sense of their obligation to check on public officials who are entrusted by their constituents to spend money wisely and to make policy decisions with the public welfare in mind. It doesn't always work that way, and often someone who knows what is going on tips a reporter.

Checking Sources

Reporters describe such sources as being "inside the factory." Not all tips are useful and some are extremely difficult to verify. All must be handled with caution. Bill Marimow of The Philadelphia Inquirer says he does the following after receiving allegations of misconduct from a source:

1. Asks the source whether he or she knows of anything in writing: an audit by an official agency or a report by a private accounting firm; a deposition in a civil suit or any other documents that support the allegations.

2. Finds out whether anyone else knows about the misconduct and is willing to talk about it—"preferably, on-the-record, but, if not, on a not-for-attribution basis." Would this person know of anything on the public record?

"At all times, in the initial phase of research, the emphasis should be on finding out if there is anything whatsoever, however small, on the public record to document the allegations," Marimow says.

3. Tries to assure the source that although the allegations sound plausible, they need to be proved "through documentable and attributable information" to write a story. "If you were me," Marimow suggests telling the source, "how would you go about documenting these allegations?" Does the source know of any official inquiry—by the FBI, district attorney, auditor, comptroller?

The Shoebox Papers

While she was gathering material for an article about the effects of federal budget cuts on the poor, Carol Matlack of the Arkansas Gazette spoke to a church worker who told her about an elderly man and his wife who had lost their home through foreclosure.

"She told me there was something suspicious about it," Matlack says.

"She gave me a bundle of the man's papers—he had recently died—that had been stored in a shoebox in his house.

"The documents proved the key to the story."

With the papers and from records in the county courthouse and through interviews, Matlack was able to piece together the story of an interlocking relationship between a private investment firm and a special assessment district in a poor neighborhood that cost residents their homes through foreclosures.

Her series begins this way:

Hosie and Clover Mae Willis were stunned when they got a letter ordering them to move out of their home. It was their first notice that their modest frame house on College Station's Frazier Pike had been sold for nonpayment of $62 in special improvement taxes several years earlier.

After describing the couple's improvements to the property, in which they had reared three children, Matlack disclosed that Southern Investment Co. of Little Rock had purchased the property from Water Improvement District 74 for $124.71 in taxes and penalties. The story continues:

Had the Willises inquired further, they would have learned that the commissioners of Water Improvement District 74 who sold their property—W. J. White, Jack Barger and Marcelite Cook—all were affiliated with Southern Investment.

They would also have learned that at least two dozen College Station residents have lost their property in a similar fashion because of a failure to pay taxes—sometimes as little as $20—to one of five water improvement districts in the predominantly poor, black community south of Little Rock Airport.

Residents said they had never been told their taxes were delinquent. Nor were they notified their land was being sold.

Why all the activity in a poor, black neighborhood? Matlack answers the question in her third article that begins:

"Little nuggets of gold." That's how Pratt Remmel, Sr., a Little Rock businessman, describes a string of weed-choked lots he owns along a pot-holed road in College Station.

Matlack points out that a highway would soon go by the area, carrying "one of the heaviest traffic volumes in Arkansas." An interchange was to be built north of College Station, and the area would have hotels, restaurants, motels and an industrial park.

Follow the buck. The paper trail Matlack followed led from the simple homes of poor folk to the offices of wheelers and dealers.

Postscript: In its next session, the General Assembly of Arkansas reformed procedures for delinquent tax notification.