This story was co-published with The Daily Beast.

The U.S. Navy's vast hospital ship, the Comfort, departed Haiti Wednesday and is due back to its home port of Baltimore this weekend. In the harbor off of Port-au-Prince, its gleaming white topsides accented with red crosses have been a conspicuous symbol of U.S. generosity since the country's devastating earthquake.

But for 11 days before it departed, as some hospitals on the ground in Haiti overflowed with patients, no inpatients with earthquake injuries were treated onboard. Instead, the Comfort's personnel engaged Monday in an "abandon ship drill," and its overhead paging system has recently heralded the visits of a host of dignitaries, including the secretary of the Navy, who came to congratulate the crew.

As the staff awaited direction, debate brewed over whether it was an appropriate time to leave -- as many American and Haitian officials believed -- or whether the unique capacities of the ship should continue to be used to save lives beyond treating acute earthquake injuries, as some health professionals urged.

Not long after the earthquake, the hospital offered services that are scarce in Haiti, including CT scans, intensive care and advanced surgery in sterile conditions. Over a period of around six weeks beginning Jan. 19, staff members performed more than 800 surgeries and treated close to 900 patients, many of them severely injured, according to military public-affairs officers. The care the ship provided drew kudos from Haitians and civilian aid workers.

But last month the Comfort stopped taking admissions and began the careful and painstaking work of transferring its remaining patients to other facilities, according to military officers on board and doctors who received the Comfort's patients. On Feb. 24, workers mopped the near-empty wards and waited for word on the ship's deployment status. One of the last of the two dozen inpatients -- a tearful woman with an injured right leg -- was lifted into a helicopter on the way to a field hospital set up by Harvard physicians near Haiti's border with the Dominican Republic.

The decision to release the ship from service in Haiti was made by the U.S. Southern Command, which judged its humanitarian relief mission to be completed, according to a press release issued this week. That mission was defined mainly as treating critically injured earthquake survivors and international responders. By contrast, a similar hospital ship, the USNS Mercy, responding to the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, had only just arrived on the scene at a similar time point as when the Comfort began drawing down its operations. The Mercy then stayed in Indonesia for five and a half weeks.

All land-based field hospitals and clinics operated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which provided surgery, wound care and childbirth services, have also closed in recent days. "The medical mission here in Haiti is converted," said Capt. Jim Imholte, who served as the head of the HHS mission in Haiti. Acute surgical needs, he said, were giving way to needs for rehabilitation and primary care. "It's a natural transition point for us back to the Haitian government and the medical institutions that are here and the [non-governmental organizations] that are here that have the skill sets perhaps in that area that we don't necessarily have."

One HHS field hospital was converted into an outpatient clinic run by a small charity. There, steps away from a soccer field filled with thousands of the dispossessed living under sheets and tarps, a curling piece of paper affixed to a wall announced the change in services in Haitian Creole: "We don't deliver babies. We don't do operations. We don't take people with gunshot wounds. We don't take people with serious injuries." Where patients could go to get those services was unclear.

U.S. officials say that decisions about withdrawing the highly visible -- and expensive -- governmental medical assets were made based on factors such as changing needs and capacities in Haiti. The number of patients requiring urgent surgery for wounds sustained in the quake has sharply declined. "The needs have shifted, and there are other more effective ways to meet the current needs," said Dr. Ron Waldman, who coordinated the medical response for the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The agency has provided nearly half a billion dollars in aid to date, including the donation of federal field hospital caches to Haitian hospitals and the ongoing support of private charities that are offering health-care services such as mobile medical clinics for the displaced. "USAID recognizes that the needs of the Haitian people remain great," Waldman said, "and will continue to adapt its programs to the needs even as they continue to change."

The Haitian government, which faced pressure from fee-for-service doctors who lost business to foreigners providing free health care, also supported the Comfort's departure. "The Haitian government thanked them for the good job that they did and invited them to leave," said Dr. Jack Lafontant, a Haitian physician who served as a liaison between national health officials and the Comfort. "After two to three weeks, the field hospitals, the Comfort and even the public hospitals in Haiti did not receive as many patients," he added. "There is no more emergency."

But that characterization was disputed by longtime aid workers who expect the emergency phase of Haiti's disaster to continue for a long time, as the rainy season begins and hundreds of thousands continue to live with inadequate shelter. Other Haitian physicians pointed to the need for skin grafts, complicated wound treatment and the correction of surgeries performed hastily under less-than-optimal conditions. "You can't expect to come in for six weeks, restore [medical services] to what they were previously, and leave," said Dr. Vanessa Rouzier, who works with the Gheskio medical clinic in Port-au-Prince. "Everybody knows full well that's inadequate." While international planning to support Haiti's evolving health care needs is under way, she said, "the concern is that all these institutions are leaving and there's still a huge gap."

A short boat trip away from hospital ship's empty wards, one type of gap was evident. Volunteers at the partially destroyed general hospital said that patients in the crowded, bare-bones medical ward are visited rarely by doctors, and nurses are in short supply.

On a recent day, a child died for lack of an oxygen regulator, a common piece of equipment that fits atop an oxygen tank, according to leaders of the medical organization Partners in Health. "The system, such as it is, is pretty well broken," said Dr. James Wilentz, a cardiologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York who recently volunteered at the university hospital. "I don't know whether there was that much of a system prior to this."

Bringing advanced medical care to a developing country that had little of it prior to a disaster presents built-in ethical questions: What level of care must be restored before it is acceptable to depart? And does "earthquake-related" medical need include only broken bones suffered during the event -- much as the Comfort defined it -- or does it extend to children injured weeks or months later playing around mounds of sharp concrete rubble, or an asthma attack brought on by living outdoors breathing burning garbage in a tightly packed camp?

"The problem is that need is never going to go away 100 percent," said Dr. Miriam Aschkenasy, who served as a rotating director of the Fond Parisien Disaster Recovery Center in Haiti run by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. Aschkenasy said the timing of the Comfort's departure was reasonable. "They're not a solution. They're an emergency bridge. To me, that's what I see their role is, and I think they played that perfectly."

Whether outside health organizations have risen to replace that bridge fully remains to be seen. A number of non-governmental field hospitals have remained open, helping to replace collapsed or damaged Haitian health facilities. Foreign medical volunteers, including many Americans, continue to work alongside Haitian colleagues at public and private hospitals around the country. However, as some medical groups depart, others committed to staying for a longer period are experiencing difficulty covering all needs. And development experts say that strengthening Haitian government institutions -- a goal of international assistance before the earthquake -- has scarcely begun.

On a morning in late February, an inflatable field hospital established by Doctors Without Borders had 20 percent more patients than beds. Dr. Michel Jannsen, then the hospital's head, said nearly 100 additional patients arrived in a single day after military and governmental field hospitals from Europe, North America and Asia as well as smaller non-governmental organizations had pulled out of the country.

The patients, he said, "are not cured. They are still sick." What's more, he said, given the massive destruction of the city and the few options for decent shelter, even those well enough for discharge and outpatient care had no place to go. Two months after the quake, hundreds of thousands of displaced Haitians are still squatting in vast fields under sheets and tarps. As surgical activities wound down on the Comfort, Lt. Cmdr. Thomas Olivero, department head of the ship's main operating room, said staff members were still itching to offer aid. "Particularly military people, when they're deployed they like to be kept busy," he said. "You want to take care of people. We know there's a lot of people out there that still need help."

Experts agree that support to Haiti's medical and public-health infrastructure will be needed for the long haul to protect the investments the U.S. has already made. "There are big challenges ahead," said Dr. Helen Miller, a pediatric emergency physician from Oregon who worked at a government field hospital last month. People living in crowded camps are at risk for infectious-disease outbreaks, she said, and their regular illnesses may worsen under the stressful conditions. "This is a marathon."

A police report about the shooting of a man whose burned corpse was later discovered in a car on the Algiers levee after Hurricane Katrina apparently differs from the report originally written by the sergeant whose name appears on the document’s cover page, sources close to a federal investigation into the matter say.

The report attempts to explain why an officer fired his rifle at a man he thought was looting an Algiers strip mall on Sept. 2, 2005, four days after Katrina.

Though the officer, David Warren, did not think his shot struck anyone, details of the incident described in the report square with the shooting of Henry Glover, who perished in police custody later that day and whose corpse was later incinerated in a car on the levee.

The report offers a few more details about what may have happened to Glover, the subject of an intensive federal civil rights probe expected to result in police indictments.

That probe is occurring against the backdrop of another sprawling probe into the shootings by New Orleans police of six people on the Danziger Bridge on Sept. 4, 2005, which have led to two guilty pleas by officers who say they participated in a wide-ranging cover-up. All told, the FBI has confirmed at least seven civil rights probes into the New Orleans Police Department.

The report about the Sept. 2 shooting incident raises as many questions as it answers.

For instance, the initial incident report purports to have been written by Sgt. Nina Simmons. But sources close to the case say she did not write it, at least not in its present form.

While Simmons, then a supervisor in the Algiers-based 4th District, filled out and signed the NOPD’s standard cover page for a police report and submitted a report to superiors, a source said she did not write the following two typewritten pages.

The report is vague about whether the man who was shot at posed a threat to Warren, saying the officer saw something in the man’s right hand “which he perceived was a weapon,” causing him to fear for his safety and fire. In general, officers aren’t supposed to fire their weapons unless they are facing a person posing a physical threat to themselves or others.

Although protocol requires all weapons discharges to be reported to the Public Integrity Bureau, in this case, the report says, Warren’s superiors simply reviewed the shooting and deemed it justified. That course was followed, the report suggests, because Katrina made following normal practices impossible. Experts who examined the report said there isn’t enough information in the report to determine whether the shooting was proper.

City ‘Plagued by Looters’

And while police incident reports are generally dry recitations of the relevant circumstances, the Warren incident report pauses at several points to make reference to the conditions around the city.

“It should be noted that at this time the entire City of New Orleans was plagued by looters at almost every section of the city,” it says, after describing the alleged looter’s truck. “It is also a fact that Police Officer Kevin Thomas had been severely wounded by being shot to the head by a looter. These brazen criminal acts had all police officers on high alert.”

The NOPD declined to answer questions about the report, citing the ongoing federal investigation. NOPD spokesman Bob Young provided this statement: “The information that you are requesting is part of the federal investigation currently in progress. The NOPD will not comment on any part of the ongoing federal investigation. The NOPD has cooperated with the federal investigators and will continue to cooperate throughout their investigation.”

Simmons’ attorney, Townsend Myers, declined to comment, while Warren’s attorney did not return a request for comment.

Shooting Reported Promptly

Warren’s attorney, Joseph Albe, has previously acknowledged that federal investigators think his client shot Glover, although he has disputed that the known facts definitively connect Warren to that shooting. Warren left the force in 2008.

In an interview last month, Albe explained Warren’s situation like this: Warren was guarding a building at the time, and because two men were “charging” toward the building, Warren felt he was in danger. He fired his rifle once, not knowing where the bullet landed, then called ranking officers and reported the shooting.

“He did exactly what he was supposed to have done,” Albe said.

A newcomer to the NOPD at the time of Katrina, Warren was actually stationed in the 7th District in eastern New Orleans, Albe said. But Warren lives on the West Bank and wasn’t able to get to that flooded area of the city, so after the storm he reported to duty at the 4th District.

On Sept. 2, supervisors paired Warren with Officer Linda Howard, a more experienced officer, assigning them to protect the 4th district’s detective bureau, on the second floor of a shopping complex that included a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant. Both Warren and Howard were on the second-story balcony outside the bureau, according to the report.

The shooting actually took place behind the complex, according to the report. The officers heard a car approaching. As they moved to the part of the balcony facing a narrow parking lot bordering Seine Street, referred to as a “back service alley,” Howard saw a white pick-up truck with a “Firestone” logo, according to the report.

Two men got out of the truck, heading quickly toward the rear gate of the building, she said.

The report states that Warren, who was in uniform, identified himself as a police officer, yelling, “Police—get out!” One of the men looked at him and continued toward the building, the report states. Warren then saw “an object” that he “perceived was a weapon.”

A handwritten “resisting arrest report” also obtained by The Times-Picayune is less specific about what Warren saw. This document, also signed by Simmons, as well as then-Lt. Gary Gremillion, says Warren spotted an “unknown type object” in the alleged looter’s right hand.

Officer Thought His Shot Missed

In both reports, Warren, who won a precision shooting award in the NOPD’s academy, says he feared for his safety. He fired his gun in the direction of the suspect below him. Both men then took off down Seine Street.

After the shooting, Warren believed “he missed the suspect,” the report states.

Howard could not see Warren fire his weapon from her position, according to the report. She did not return a call for comment.

In the last three paragraphs, the report states that after the shooting Warren notified Simmons, although it doesn’t say when. Other officers looked for a shooting victim, but couldn’t find one, the report states.

The report notes that knowledge of the incident went up the NOPD command structure to 4th District Capt. David Kirsch and Lt. Robert Italiano, head of the district investigative unit. The required notifications to the Public Integrity Bureau and other units could not be made because of the storm, the report says.

Kirsch and Italiano, along with the on-scene supervisor, eventually concluded the use of force by Warren was justified, the report states. The NOPD’s operations manual notes that state law defines the justifiable use of deadly force as when an officer is in “imminent danger of losing his life or receiving great bodily harm” or must protect another person from the same level of threat.

Kirsch did not respond to a request for comment; Italiano, who has since retired from the force, declined to comment.

Key Facts Absent From Report

Experts who reviewed the report at the request of reporters said the document left many questions unanswered—including whether Warren acted properly in pulling the trigger.

“It’s impossible to tell from the report whether you had a good shoot or you didn’t,” said Ron McCarthy, a former Los Angeles police officer who has consulted for the U.S. Justice Department on shooting incidents.

In his view, key facts are absent from the report, including Warren’s distance from the citizen he fired at, and how long he waited before notifying his superiors of the incident. McCarthy also wondered what became of the white pick-up described in the document. “What about the truck?” he asked. “That’s missing from the report.”

However, he tempered his criticism by saying the department couldn’t do a thorough investigation until the crisis had abated. “It’s unreasonable” to expect officers to do full-blown investigations under catastrophic conditions, said McCarthy, who has trained police in multiple countries.

McCarthy also found some positive signs in the document, starting with the fact that Warren chose to alert his bosses to the incident. Officers, he said, have “a tendency not report to shootings in circumstances that are chaotic or out of control, like Katrina.”

David Klinger, an associate criminology professor at the University of Missouri-St.Louis and senior research scientist with the Police Foundation in Washington, wasn’t ready to draw firm conclusions from the report.

“Given the thinness of the document, it’s very hard to assess” whether the shooting was appropriate, said Klinger.

Klinger said he thinks NOPD brass should have gotten a more complete picture by conducting interviews with Warren and Howard when the situation in New Orleans stabilized. Such an approach would have generated “a fine-grained statement” from Warren.

In Klinger’s view, “The officer’s been done a disservice because we cannot know what officer Warren was thinking when he pulled the trigger.”

Klinger, who wrote a book titled “Into the Kill Zone: A Cop’s Eye View of Deadly Force,” said it’s crucial for police departments to investigate all police shootings—including those with no apparent victims. It’s not uncommon, he said, for officers to believe their bullets have missed when they’ve actually wounded or even killed citizens.

It doesn’t appear that any investigative team was called in to examine the shooting, although the report concludes with the revelation that civilians in the 3400 block of Seine Street—one block from the strip mall—told officers a man had been shot nearby and was taken to the hospital by “an unknown person.”

The report notes that the homicide squad was not called, although department policy requires homicide detectives to evaluate any police shooting that results in injury or death. Although the report was written in December, after the immediate chaos caused by the storm had subsided, the report said the unit was not available in “the wake and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.”

If Warren had missed the man he shot at, NOPD policy would call for the incident to be reviewed by a Public Integrity Bureau investigator and, eventually, a team of supervisors to determine whether the shooting was an indication that more training or discipline was warranted.

But it doesn’t appear that review happened. These reviews are triggered by the assignment of an “ASI number,” which is assigned to each officer-involved shooting, said Felix Loicano, former commander of the Public Integrity Bureau. “That is what generates the next step,” he said.

The NOPD declined to comment on whether such a review took place.

Algiers Man Is Flagged Down to Help

Given Glover’s location, it’s difficult to understand how Warren would not have realized it if he had been shot.

William Tanner, an Algiers man, has said he was driving by and encountered Glover, his brother and a friend near the intersection of Texas Drive and Seine Street. That is about a half-block from the balcony perch where Warren said he was stationed—a spot in clear view of the shopping center.

Tanner was flagged down by Glover’s brother, Edward King, who said a man had been shot and needed assistance.

After getting the injured man in the car, Tanner said he decided the hospital was too far away and instead opted to drive to a nearby elementary school, where the NOPD’s SWAT team had set up camp.

But at the SWAT encampment, Tanner and King have said, they were handcuffed, beaten and yelled at. Officers indicated they believed Glover was a looter and offered him no assistance.

Eventually, one of the officers took Tanner’s keys and drove off with his car. Glover’s body was still inside, Tanner said. It’s not clear when he died.

While the police let the other men go, Tanner did not learn for weeks what had happened to his car. Eventually, a federal agent alerted him that its burned remains were on the Algiers levee, not far from the 4th District station. Glover’s charred body was pulled out of that vehicle, according to the Orleans Parish coroner’s office.

Yesterday we reported on the secrecy and opacity surrounding the House ethics committee. Here's an update on what has happened since:

The GOP, which initially advocated for the investigation into former Rep. Eric Massa to continue, proposed yesterday that a new investigation be launched into how House Democratic leaders handled the allegations that Massa, a New York Democrat, had inappropriate contact with aides. The decision to do so now rests with the House ethics committee.

Meanwhile new and conflicting reports about the Massa investigation have since emerged.

On Wednesday, most news organizations reported that the committee's investigation into Massa had been closed because of his resignation. Only The Washington Post, at the time, cited two unnamed sources saying that the investigation could continue. By Thursday, the Post had come around and was also reporting that the investigation was closed. Then Politico posted a report citing an unnamed aide who claimed that "the ethics committee never ended its [Massa] investigation," and "the stories saying that it had were wrong."

The confused reports only further confirm our point about the need for more transparency in the workings of the House ethics committee. Our own calls to the committee have not been returned.

Not a big, flashy headline, but we thought it was worth noting:

Today the Senate unanimously voted to amend a jobs bill with new rules to strengthen the government’s tracking and reporting of stimulus spending and its effectiveness. Sponsored by Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, the new amendment requires federal agencies to assess and update current methods for tracking stimulus funds and to file quarterly reports for Congress and the public.

The announcement of the amendment follows our reporting at ProPublica showing that federal data on delinquent “two-time loser” stimulus recipients—recipients who had failed to file two required reports—were actually erroneous. We found that as many as 60 of the 360 contractors called out had actually filed the reports. The White House Office of Management and Budget acknowledged to us that the list was inaccurate.

Two ProPublica reporting projects were finalists for the Scripps Howard Foundation National Journalism Award. Abrahm Lustgarten and Joaquin Sapien were finalists for the Foundation's Edward J. Meeman Environmental Reporting prize for their coverage of the dangers of drilling for natural gas. And Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber were finalists for the Roy Howard Public Service Reporting prize for their work on the failures of the California Board of Registered Nursing to properly discipline dangerous nurses.

All of the winners and finalists can be viewed here. Congratulations to all of those honored!

March 12: This story has been updated.

The second guilty plea in the Danziger Bridge case today revealed additional details about the conduct of New Orleans police after Hurricane Katrina and suggested more prosecutions of higher-ranking officers are yet to come.

Former police detective Jeffrey Lehrmann pleaded guilty to failing to report a felony in connection to a Sept. 4, 2005 incident in which officers shot six civilians on or near the bridge. Two people were killed. 

According to a document filed by federal prosecutors, Lehrmann helped cover up police misconduct by concocting evidence portraying the citizens who were shot as gun-wielding criminals.

Lehrmann also participated in a scheme to plant a gun at the scene, the document says, and even helped create a fictional witness whose “statements” were included in a 54-page police report on the shootings. (The New Orleans Times-Picayune first raised questions about the existence of bogus witnesses to the bridge incident in 2007.)

Prosecutors’ case against Lehrmann also points to a bigger fish: His supervisor—unnamed in the court documents—who allegedly provided the planted gun and committed other crimes during the investigation. 

Lehrmann’s supervisor at the time was Sgt. Arthur Kaufman. A call to Kaufman’s attorney, Stephen London, was not immediately returned, but London has acknowledged to the Times-Picayune that Kaufman is a target of the federal probe.

The Danziger investigation just is one of many examples of questionable post-Katrina police work. Late last year ProPublica, the Times-Picayune and PBS “Frontline” began scrutinizing other violent episodes that occurred the week after the hurricane made landfall, including the fatal shootings of Danny Brumfield and Matthew McDonald, and the non-fatal shooting of Keenon McCann. All of the men were shot by NOPD officers.

Our investigation identified a disturbing pattern: In case after case, NOPD officers conducted superficial investigations before concluding their fellow cops had acted appropriately. The U.S. Department of Justice is now looking into these shootings as well.

Update: Stephen London, Arthur Kaufman’s attorney, called us back today to say, “I’m not particularly concerned with what Mr. Lehrmann says because it’s not true.” Kaufman is still on the payroll at the NOPD and has not been suspended or placed on administrative leave, London added.

In recent years, the Pentagon has come to increasingly rely on private military contractors to do the work that members of the military used to do. But as the number of civilian contractors has grown, so too has the number of deaths and injuries of those contractors and with it, the cost of paying health care benefits for their injury claims.

T. Christian Miller recently won the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting for his coverage of the numerous obstacles contractors face when they’ve been injured and try to collect benefits. We spoke to him about who is responsible for taking care of injured contractors, the ordeal they have to go through to be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, the role AIG plays in this, contractor suicide rates and how Congress is addressing the problem.

We also hear from one of the people facing the difficulties Miller has documented. Bill Carlisle Jr. was a contractor with defense firm KBR. He sustained both physical and psychological injuries, and is now fighting insurer AIG for the benefits he says they owe him.

Articles discussed in this podcast:

Injured War Zone Contractors Fight to Get Care From AIG and Other Insurers

The Other Victims of Battlefield Stress; Defense Contractors’ Mental Health Neglected

Injured Abroad, Neglected at Home: Labor Dept. Slow to Help War Zone Contractors

Labor Dept., Congress Plan Improvements to System to Care for Injured War Contractors

Pentagon Study Proposes Overhaul of Defense Base Act to Cover Care for injured Contractors

March 11: This post has been updated.

Frank Minyard, the Orleans Parish coroner, has concluded that he cannot determine what caused the death of Jannie Burgess, a 79-year-old patient who perished at Memorial Medical Center after a doctor ordered that she be given multiple doses of morphine in a short period. The hospital was cut off for several days by the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina and a number of patients were found dead with elevated levels of morphine and other drugs.

"We cannot tell what she died of except that she was extremely ill," Minyard said in a phone interview several hours before a scheduled press conference. "She had a lot of physiologic reasons to die." Minyard said his official finding was that the cause of Burgess' death was "unclassified." His ruling makes it highly unlikely that any charges will be brought in the case.

The details of Burgess' death were first disclosed in a ProPublica report published in The New York Times Magazine last August. Her medical records showed that she was repeatedly dosed with morphine after the hospital had lost power, temperatures soared, and rescue helicopters failed to arrive in sufficient numbers.

The physician who ordered the medication, Dr. Ewing Cook, said that he intentionally "hastened her demise" because Burgess, who had advanced, metastatic uterine cancer, was close to death, was being cared for by nurses whose help was needed elsewhere, and would have suffered greatly if her pain medication wore off during any attempt to evacuate her.

"Dr. Cook thinks that he knocked her off," Minyard said, "but we can't prove that. He might have, he might not have. Because it's not 100 percent proved, we have to call it unclassified." He said some of the experts he consulted pointed to the fact that Burgess' death was recorded as having occurred more than three hours after the last of the morphine injections.

Cook declined to comment for this article. Minyard said that he had not spoken with Cook during his investigation. He said that during his investigation he consulted with four pathologists who work in his office, three local experts and Dr. Michael Baden, a renowned forensic pathologist from New York.

Baden has said he has a different view of the case. In an interview several months ago, after he reviewed Burgess' records, Baden said that Burgess' death was "no question a homicide." Homicide is defined by coroners as a death caused by the action of another person. Such findings do not address the issue of intent which is critical to deciding whether a crime has been committed.

Burgess' daughter, Linette Burgess Guidi, said she had not seen the experts' determinations. She said she hoped that some sort of review board could review Cook's actions. "I understand he was under a lot of pressure," she said. "I'm not out for vengeance. I just want to know the truth, I want to know what happened." She added, "There's too many questions."

The district attorney in Orleans Parish, Leon Cannizzaro, will ultimately decide whether there will be further criminal investigation or prosecution related to Burgess' death. Minyard conducted his assessment of the Burgess case at Cannizzaro's request. In September 2009, shortly after the ProPublica report, Cannizzaro said he asked Minyard "to classify the deaths reported in" the article. Cannizzaro could not be reached immediately for comment on the coroner's decision.

In 2006, authorities arrested Dr. Anna Pou and nurses Lori Budo and Cheri Landry for alleged mercy killings at the same hospital after Katrina. A local grand jury heard evidence in the case and declined to bring charges. The nurses and Dr. Pou emphatically denied that they had murdered patients and the case prompted outrage in New Orleans where medical professionals who worked in horrific conditions after the storm were widely viewed as heroes and victims. Some close to Minyard speculated that the coroner, who recently won re-election to his 10th term, decided to postpone his determination in the case until after the election -- something Minyard denies.

Minyard, 80, said the reason he had not completed his investigation of Burgess' death before now was because his office has a great deal of work on other cases and is understaffed. "I've just got too much going," he said when contacted last December. "I just want to make sure when I do it that I have it right."

Update: Minyard's press conference has happened. For more on the conference, go to the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

The District Attorney's office has just released this statement: "Since it is the Coroner's opinion that this victim did not die as a result of being administered a lethal dose of narcotics, I cannot pursue a homicide charge at this time."

Tickle fights vs. groping. Salty language vs. sexual harassment. For those who've been following the media circus around ex-Rep. Eric Massa, D-N.Y., there's been quite a lot to follow. Nonetheless, on Wednesday the House ethics committee closed its investigation into Massa, claiming his resignation rendered any findings "irrelevant" and put him "outside the reach of any punishment," according to The Washington Post.

This decision has only inflamed the partisan ethics battle within the House of Representatives. Republicans, wanting the probe to continue, criticized Democrats for failing to look into one of their own. Democrats have fired back, defending their record and pointing to a list of Republican members who have breached ethics rules.

All this comes after the same House ethics committee, in the weeks before, cleared seven lawmakers of wrongdoing in a defense-lobbying investigation and "admonished" Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y., for violating ethics rules against accepting gifts when he attended conferences in the Caribbean in 2007 and 2008. The investigation into other allegations against Rangel continues, but the committee's recent decisions have brought renewed criticism and attention to it.

The process of ethics investigations is opaque, to say the least, and the reporting around the ethics committee reflects this. So let's take a brief look into the timeline of events and some of the media coverage about the committee.

Massa took office in January 2009. "Not long after," according to the Post, "several male staffers began to feel uncomfortable with the sexually loaded language their boss routinely used." The Post's timeline continues:

As the months passed, rumors began to circulate in the office that the married New York Democrat had sexually propositioned young male staffers and interns -- allegations, according to two sources with knowledge of the inquiry, that included Massa groping at least two aides.

None of this was reported to the committee until at least Feb. 8, 2010. Even as details continued to emerge, most news reports -- the Post's aside -- said the committee was investigating allegations that Massa harassed one aide, not several. The committee's one-line statement last week didn't provide much illumination, confirming only that the panel was, in fact, investigating. No further details were provided.

Until Wednesday afternoon, when the committee announced it was closing its investigation, news reports conflicted as to whether it would continue, given Massa's resignation.

CBS reported that "his resignation means the ethics committee will not investigate his conduct."

But the Post reported differently: "Though Massa has resigned, it is possible that the ethics investigation will continue, according to two sources. The reason for such an inquiry would be to address the circumstances of any hostile work environment." The Post corrected this with a new report hours later.

It's hard for reporters -- for anyone, really -- to figure out exactly what the ethics committee is up to.

Officially called the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, the committee is a 10-person panel -- half Democrats, half Republicans -- which, according to the Post, "tends to reveal its activities publicly only in rare instances, as when House leaders have already discussed them."

Historically, the committee has done some important work -- exposing crooked dealings, forcing resignations, and imposing fines -- until the aftermath of a 1997 investigation of then-Speaker Newt Gingrich led to "a perceived excess of frivolous complaints and partisan mudslinging," according to The Nation. This led the House to block outside groups from filing complaints, and began a seven-year truce during which both parties agreed not to file ethics complaints. The truce ruptured in 2004 when a complaint was brought against Tom DeLay, then the House majority leader. He was dealt three letters of rebuke -- or "admonishments."

What followed were years of continued political wrangling over the committee, until in 2008, recognizing its own ineffectiveness at policing itself, the House created an independent, six-person ethics board called the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE). The OCE was to investigate independently and forward its findings to the ethics committee for further investigation.

This part of the process seems to have worked in recent cases. The OCE referred its findings on Rangel's Caribbean "gift" scandal to the ethics committee in May 2009, complete with findings of fact. The committee issued its findings nine months later. The OCE referred its findings on the defense lobbyist situation in November 2009. The ethics committee cleared the lawmakers three months later. In Massa's case, the complaint does not appear to have gone through the OCE, but instead directly to the House committee.

The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has recently called the ethics committee "notoriously lax," a description supported by many of its post-truce decisions -- most infamously, its 2006 decision not to take action against House members or staff in the Mark Foley saga.

For now, the partisan battle over ethics continues, which we know historically -- given the truce -- is bad for both sides, and even worse for ethics accountability.

Last month when we first wrote about the faux "Census" mailers from the Republican National Committee, we reported that though deceptive, the mailings were likely legal.

That could change soon.

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives unanimously passed legislation that specifically bans misleading mailings that are designed to look like they're from the Census Bureau. The new bill requires that any mailing marked "census" include the sender's name and address, plus a disclaimer that the survey is "not affiliated with the federal government," reports the Associated Press.

At the time, the fake census mailings -- which were really fundraising surveys from the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee -- drew criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike. Though Politico reports that such mailings from Republicans have been around for several years, the practice was of particular concern this year because of the 2010 census. The U.S. Census Bureau itself has warned that the use of misleading forms could undermine response for the official census and increase the costs of follow-up.

The bill goes to the Senate next, where it is expected to move forward.

The American Society of Magazine Editors announced today that an article written by ProPublica reporter Sheri Fink is a finalist for a National Magazine Award in the reporting category, which honors "the enterprise, skill and analysis that a magazine exhibits in covering an event or problem of contemporary interest and significance."

Fink's remarkable two-year investigation, "The Deadly Choices at Memorial," explored what really happened to some of the patients who died at New Orleans's Memorial Medical Center in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The 13,000-word story was published in The New York Times Magazine last August.

Other magazines in the reporting category include The Boston Globe Magazine, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair. Click here for a full list of NMA nominees.

A second former New Orleans Police Department officer has been charged in federal court in connection with the Sept. 4, 2005 shootings on the Danziger Bridge. Jeffrey Lehrmann, who left the NOPD to work for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was charged last month with concealing a crime, according to court documents unsealed Tuesday and obtained by our partners at the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

Late last year, ProPublica, PBS “Frontline” and the Times-Picayune teamed up to examine a string of violent encounters between police and civilians that occurred in New Orleans during the week after Hurricane Katrina made landfall.

The bridge incident was particularly notorious. Police officers shot six citizens, killing two. Lehrmann, tasked with investigating what happened on the bridge, “participated in the creation of false reports” and provided “false information to investigating agents,” according to the bill of information filed by the U.S. Department of Justice. 

As the Times-Picayune noted, Lehrmann also plays a central role in another ongoing controversy: While working as an NOPD detective he helped build the case against Michael Anderson, whose murder conviction was overturned recently when a judge found that prosecutors had failed to turn over key evidence to defense lawyers.

Last month, former NOPD Lt. Michael Lohman pleaded guilty to conspiring to obstruct justice in connection with the bridge shootings.

The Supreme Court recently freed corporations to spend more money on aggressive election ads. But if businesses take advantage of this new freedom, the public probably won't know it, because it's easy for them to legally hide their political spending.

Under current disclosure laws for federal elections, it's virtually impossible for the public to track how much a business spends, what it's spending on, or who ultimately benefits. Experts say the transparency problem extends to state and local races as well.

"There is no good way to gauge" how much any given company spends on elections, said Karl Sandstrom, a former vice chairman of the Federal Election Commission and counsel to the Center for Political Accountability. "There's no central collection of the information, no monitoring."

Companies invest in politics to win favorable regulations or block those "that could choke off their business model," said Robert Kelner, chairman of Covington & Burling's Washington, D.C., political law group. But they'd rather hide these political activities, he said, because they fear backlash from customers or shareholders.

For instance, a company may want to help Democratic politicians who support health care reforms that would benefit the company, but it worries about offending "Republican shareholders who may care more about their personal ideology than about their three shares of stock in the company," said Kelner, who says he represents many politically active Fortune 500 companies. "The same would be true on the other side of the political spectrum."

Businesses must reveal their identities on public reports to the Federal Election Commission if they buy advertising on their own. But one popular and perfectly legal conduit for companies wanting to influence politics under the radar is to give money to nonprofit trade groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The Chamber and its national affiliates spent $144.5 million last year on advertising, lobbying and grass-roots activism -- more than either the Republican or Democratic party spent, according to a Center for Responsive Politics analysis of public records -- while legally concealing the names of its funders. The Los Angeles Times reported this week that the Chamber is building a grass-roots political operation that has signed up about 6 million non-Chamber members.

Some of the positions the Chamber has successfully advanced on behalf of its donors include a nationwide campaign to unseat state judges who were considered tough on corporate defendants and opposition to a federal bill that would have criminalized defective auto manufacturing.

Now the Jan. 21 Supreme Court ruling that increases the potential political clout of businesses is drawing fresh attention to the problem of tracking them.

That decision (PDF), Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, allows corporations to run television ads that don't merely speak to an issue but say outright whether a candidate should be elected, and allows them to do so any time they want to, using their general funds. The ruling also gives nonprofit groups like the Chamber these new freedoms, because they are technically structured as corporations.

Before, corporations had to rely on employee and shareholder contributions to a separate political account to finance the most explicit commercials and, in the months before an election, any issue ads that mentioned a candidate. Although the decision addressed federal election rules, its constitutional rationale also dismantles similar restrictions in 24 states.

Soon after the ruling, two Democrats -- Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York -- announced they were writing a bill to make it easier to tell which companies are backing which ads in federal elections. An outline (PDF) of that bill, which is expected to be introduced this week, proposes forcing nonprofit groups to identify those who fund their political commercials.

At present, nonprofit groups don't have to disclose the sources of their advertising money, unless the donors specified that their contributions were intended for political ads.

"Unless you're sort of dumb enough to designate your contribution to the Chamber," said Meredith McGehee, policy director of the Campaign Legal Center, "no one will ever know who's the source of those funds."

Politically active nonprofits exist across the ideological and policy spectrum and include unions as well as trade groups. Their funders include both corporations and individuals, some of them very wealthy. But campaign finance experts say groups that advocate specifically for business tend to have the greatest resources, simply because corporations have the most money to give.

The lack of tracking mechanisms sometimes leaves company officials themselves in the dark about their organization's political activities, said Adam Kanzer, managing director and general counsel of Domini Social Investments, which files shareholder resolutions to push corporations to adopt self-monitoring and disclosure practices.

"In a lot of our conversations with companies, they say, 'We don't know exactly how our money is getting spent. It's hard to get those answers,'" Kanzer said. One major drug manufacturer, he said, signed on for voluntary disclosure after learning that its funds had supported a state judicial campaign that many voters -- who could be customers or shareholders -- viewed as racist.

The public price of spotty disclosure is not being able to gauge the real effects of corporation-backed politics, McGehee said. She questioned one argument, often made by defenders of the Citizens United decision, that the 26 states that have long allowed unlimited corporate advertising in their elections haven't suffered more political corruption than the rest of the nation.

"How would you know? Most of those states have next to no disclosure," McGehee said. Corporations "could be buying outcomes left and right, but because of no disclosure, we don't know." A 2007 examination by the National Institute on Money in State Politics found that, while 39 states required some degree of disclosure by political advertisers, the laws in most were riddled with loopholes. Only five states required enough detail to link sponsors with specific ads, the report said.

Rep. Van Hollen said the disclosure requirements he and Schumer are drafting would uncover the corporate political money flowing through nonprofit channels.

"If corporations spend money in these campaigns, we cannot allow them to hide behind sham organizations and dummy corporations that mislead voters," he said in a written comment to ProPublica. "Voters have a right to know who is delivering and paying for the message."

The requirements would apply to unions and liberal nonprofits as well as trade groups, according to the early outline of the bill. The proposal mentions additional transparency requirements -- such as mandating corporate disclosures to shareholders and "stand by your ad" appearances by CEOs of companies that finance commercials directly -- and seeks outright bans on political advertising by government contractors, bailout recipients and companies significantly controlled by foreigners.

A strong disclosure law would be "hugely effective" in revealing who is paying for political speech, said Trevor Potter, a former FEC chairman and head lawyer for John McCain's presidential campaigns, who is now general counsel at Campaign Legal Center.

But precisely for that reason, Potter said, politics may get in the way of any serious reform. He expects trade groups on the right, unions on the left and other cause groups across the board to fight hard against such legislation.

Already the political battle is taking shape.

Asked to comment on the push for more disclosure, the Chamber's chief legal officer and general counsel, Steven Law, instead attacked the political motives of the proponents. "Unions overwhelmingly support those who are pushing this legislation," he said in an e-mail. "This isn't about reform, it's about politicians trying to secure advantages for themselves before an election."

That reaction drew fire from one of the nation's most politically active unions, the Service Employees International Union, which also declined to comment on the new disclosure proposals. "The coming flood of corporate and foreign money into our elections through the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a threat to democracy, plain and simple," said Anna Burger, SEIU's secretary-treasurer, in an e-mail. She called on legislators to "drag the Chamber's practices into the light of day."

The Chamber revealed more about its view of disclosure in an amicus brief (PDF) it filed in the Citizens United case on behalf of the 3 million business members it says it has. It supported the plaintiff, a nonprofit corporation called Citizens United, which wanted the Supreme Court not only to lift corporate advertising bans but also to strike down the existing disclosure requirements.

The Chamber argued that those requirements inhibited corporations from speaking out. If the public discovered that corporations were "taking controversial positions," it might punish them, the brief said. As an example, it pointed to a 2005 boycott of ExxonMobil products after the public learned the company was lobbying Congress to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.

That argument failed to persuade the high court, which by an 8-1 majority decided to leave the current disclosure laws intact.

Transparency is important, wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority, because it helps voters "give proper weight to different speakers and messages," and because it allows citizens to "see whether elected officials are 'in the pocket' of so-called moneyed interests."

If you’re on our data tools and reporting features e-mail list, you got a heads-up about this last night.

We’re making the data supporting our Recovery Tracker available to you upon request. Just fill out this form and we’ll get you state data within 48 hours.

The Recovery Tracker includes all the data used on the government’s stimulus Web site, Recovery.gov, and thousands of records the feds didn’t include—the law doesn’t require all recipients to report to Recovery.gov. We also cleaned out the cobwebs. Altogether they’re the most comprehensive publicly available analysis of stimulus spending.

Lawmakers often contend that lobbying, campaign contributions and fancy parties do not sway their votes, yet at least one company begs to differ. As The Washington Examiner reports, Pfizer based its recent decision to grant CEO Jeff Kindler a raise, at least in part, on his "developing and advancing U.S. and global public policies that serve the overall interests of our Company and our shareholders."

The language, buried in the company's most recent proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, explicitly cites Kindler's efforts in "opposing legislation that would allow for importation of prescription drugs."

Pfizer contends that importing these medicines "could jeopardize the integrity of the drug supply chain in the U.S," while groups like AARP say it's a safe and cost-effective solution to lowering drug prices.

An effort to allow importation of cheaper drugs from Canada and Europe failed last December. Sen. Byron Dorgan, who spearheaded the effort, told reporters after the vote that "the drug industry has a lot of clout in this town, and they demonstrated that tonight."

As the Sunlight Foundation noted in an extensive report highlighted by ProPublica, the pharmaceutical industry lobbying group PhRMA agreed to support the White House's health care reform effort as part of a deal that included a pledge by the administration to oppose drug importation.

Kansas and Vermont have become the two latest casualties of record unemployment insurance claims. Both states have exhausted their unemployment insurance trust funds and have turned to borrowing from the federal government to keep unemployment benefits flowing.

The 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands operate separate unemployment insurance systems, and have widely varying tax rates and benefits. While a few entered the recession with ample reserves, most had far less than the 18 months’ worth recommended by the federal government.

To see how your state’s fund is faring, click here for our unemployment insurance tracker, which has the most recent data available about funds in all the states plus D.C.

Besides Kansas and Vermont, 27 other states and the Virgin Islands have together borrowed more than $30 billion. The federal loans are interest-free until 2011, but after interest kicks in, it must be paid from the states’ general funds, taking money away from roads, schools and other priorities.

While Kansas has borrowed only about $7 million so far, officials estimate the state will borrow as much as $750 million this year. That’s a significant sum relative to the state’s $25 billion budget. (It’s also small potatoes compared with other states, which have borrowed billions. We’re looking at you Michigan and California.) Even a scheduled increase in the tax on employers, from an average of $162 to $350 per worker, will likely not make much of a dent in the Kansas’ borrowing.

Vermont, which has borrowed about $4 million so far, has already increased the average tax per worker from $239 to $329 by increasing the amount of workers’ wages that are taxed from $8,000 to $10,000, and lawmakers also canceled a scheduled benefit increase.

But that will not be enough to shore up the state’s trust fund, and lawmakers are considering legislation that would take the unusual step of imposing a .02 percent payroll tax directly on employees. (Most states fund their unemployment benefits solely through employer taxes; only Alaska, Pennsylvania and New Jersey also ask for worker contributions.) They would also increase the tax rate on employers by an as-yet-undecided amount. That tax rate has not been increased since 1983.

To see how your state’s fund is faring, click here for our unemployment insurance tracker, which has the most recent data available about funds in all the states plus D.C.

The Obama administration has paid out $314 billion of the nearly $800 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, according to our weekly breakdown. That figure, which includes $195 billion in spending and an estimated $119 billion in tax cuts, is just shy of 40 percent of the total stimulus package.

You can see more information on stimulus spending, including a breakdown of spending by agency, at our interactive Stimulus Progress Bar. You can also see how fast each agency is spending its money by checking out our Stimulus Speed Chart.

After shrinking for several months, taxpayer exposure to the bailout jumped in February, due to Fannie Mae’s receiving another $15.3 billion.

The toll stands at $315.3 billion. That number accounts for not only the bailout money still outstanding, but also the revenue that the government has collected from recipients. Included in that revenue is $1.5 billion the Treasury Department received last week for its auction of Bank of America’s common stock warrants. Altogether, the government made a profit of about $4.6 billion through its investment in Bank of America.

Check out our frequently updated Bailout Scorecard for the complete rundown. Our comprehensive list of bailout recipients accounts both for the TARP and the separate bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. All told, the government has lent, invested or spent about $515 billion in the bailout so far.

The Treasury has pumped a total of $75.2 billion into Fannie since the government takeover in September 2008. Together with money invested in Freddie, the total comes to $125.9 billion. Freddie has continued to take losses, but hasn’t required more government money since last May.

According to its proposed budget for 2011 (PDF) the administration expects to invest a total of $188 billion in the two companies – meaning that about $62.1 billion in bailouts are still to come. Some experts have criticized that estimate as being too low.

Meanwhile, the administration has punted on the problem of what to do with the two companies. Last year, officials said that they’d offer a broad plan this February. That plan never came. Testifying before Congress late last month, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said Treasury would offer some “principles and broad objectives” sometime this year, with the goal of offering a concrete proposal next year.

So expect the current state of affairs to continue for at least another year. The companies are in government conservatorship, which means that while they’re under the close watch of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, they’re still nominally separate from the government. The government keeps the companies solvent; in return, the companies say they’ve made stabilizing the housing market their priority.

Attention, bookmarks! We’ve collected all of our coverage of the government’s mortgage modification program into one place. You can also find our interactive charts showing how well—or poorly—each mortgage servicer has been performing in the program.

Check it out.

Weeks Marine won a $5 million stimulus contract to dredge the Mississippi River Delta in Plaquemines Parish, La. The family-owned firm put 37 people to work from June to September. When the project ended, it reported all this for public view on the government’s stimulus Web site, Recovery.gov.

Yet Weeks Marine recently found itself on a government list of “two-time losers,” accused of flouting stimulus rules by failing to file two required reports telling taxpayers how it spent their money.

“I don’t know why we’re on the list,” said Win Apel, general counsel for the New Jersey-based dredging company. “We did in fact file the report.”

Weeks Marine is not an anomaly. ProPublica identified as many as 60 other suspect cases on the list of 360 contractors, local governments and nonprofits compiled by the White House Office of Management and Budget. When asked about the apparent problems, the government’s stimulus oversight panel confirmed that the list had mistakes.

“The list, which we characterized as two-time losers, was certified by various federal agencies,” said Ed Pound, spokesman for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board. “It’s bad enough when recipients make errors. It is far more frustrating when agencies do.”

Previous data errors, such as dubious job numbers and incorrect congressional districts, have become easy pickings for Republicans trying to tarnish the stimulus program.

When Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act last year, it set up an ambitious plan to publicize how the money was spent. Nearly everyone who got a grant or contract was required to file quarterly reports detailing what they did with the money, how far along the project was and how many jobs they created.

According to the White House, 98 percent of recipients complied with the law. Federal agencies were required to find out who didn’t. The budget office compiled the list of supposed scofflaws and sent it to the Recovery Board, which sought to shame them by posting their names (PDF) on Recovery.gov.

“The two-time losers—those who failed to file reports in the last quarter of 2009 and the earlier reporting period—should really be embarrassed,” Earl Devaney, chairman of the board, said in a news release. “They took millions of dollars and then thumbed their noses at taxpayers.”

Most of the unreported money involves U.S. Army Corps of Engineers projects, Justice Department grants to police departments and Health and Human Services grants to rural medical clinics.

ProPublica checked the two-time loser list by comparing project award numbers and dollar amounts against other data that had been reported on Recovery.gov. The comparison suggested that as many as 60 projects on the list may actually have been reported to the government.

Of those, we sent a sample of 11 projects to the Recovery Board, which so far has verified that six had filed reports and were erroneously included on the losers’ list. 

Weeks Marine, for example, filed its report in October. The report is on Recovery.gov, but with a bigger award amount than shown on the “losers” list. The company sent a letter last week to Devaney and its congressmen asking to be removed from the list.

A similar thing appears to have happened to Luhr Bros., an Illinois company dredging the Ohio River in Paducah, Ky. The company’s contract is reported as $4.7 million on Recovery.gov, but the OMB list had the firm down for $1.7 million.

The Finger Lakes Migrant Health Project, a clinic in upstate New York, has received three stimulus grants. But one of them, for $1.2 million, is missing from Recovery.gov. Mary Zelazny, the clinic’s CEO, said the clinic filed the report and provided ProPublica with a copy of a confirmation e-mail she received from the government.

Corps of Engineers officials said the agency is trying to figure out how the recipients who actually reported ended up on the list of shame. A Health and Human Services spokesman said that its review missed some health clinics that had incorrectly filed as subrecipients of grants instead of primary recipients.

Two quarterly reporting deadlines have passed so far, one in October and another in January. Recipients accused of missing both range from John Dewey College in Puerto Rico to the Native Village of Diomede, Alaska, an ice-capped island of 146 people in the Bering Strait, where—as Sarah Palin once said—residents can actually see Russia about 2.5 miles away.

Some who received the largest unreported grants or contracts—including the Ramah Navajo reservation in New Mexico, Del Norte Clinics of California and Kingridge Enterprises of Little Rock, Ark.—did not return calls for comment.

In at least one case, the contractor denies that his project is a stimulus project. Eyak Technology, a Virginia communications firm owned by Alaska natives, received a $650,000 no-bid contract to work on a radio tower for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

But when Customs drew up the contract it failed to include the stimulus provisions, and Eyak has refused to allow the agency to amend it. Customs spokesman Tara Dunlop said the agency is pursuing “all available legal avenues to ensure Eyak complies with the law and files the required reports.”

Brad Elmquist, Eyak’s vice president of operations, said his firm is complying with the law because there’s nothing on the contract that says it’s funded by the stimulus.

The stimulus contained no penalties for those who fail to file their reports. Devaney, the government’s stimulus watchdog, has testified before Congress in support of establishing penalties, such as fines.

In a December memorandum (PDF), OMB director Peter Orszag advised federal agencies to consider using existing administrative sanctions, including revoking funds from recipients who chronically fail to report.

OMB spokesman Tom Gavin said only one recipient had been penalized in that way so far.

That recipient, the child hunger group Share Our Strength, lost its $87,000 stimulus grant from Americorps to teach low-income families how to cook healthy meals on a budget.

Share Our Strength spokeswoman Margie Fleming Glennon said the group initially didn’t realize there was a requirement and then encountered technical problems filing its second report because the charity’s contractor registration number had expired.

Most Americorps workers whose positions were funded with stimulus money won’t lose their jobs, said Eric Schweikert, the group’s chief financial officer. Share Our Strength will find a spot for them on another federal grant project or pay their salaries with other funds until their current project ends.

“We really regret that we couldn’t figure out the system fast enough,” Schweikert said.

But not everyone flagged as a non-reporter was as gracious.

The Lebanon, Mo., police department was on the “losers” list for not reporting on a $1.2 million stimulus grant from the Justice Department to hire more officers. Jeff Merriman, a consultant who manages the grant, said the department filed a report with the department but not a required report for Recovery.gov.

“I’m not sure where the disconnect happened here, but if the Recovery Act board says we knew about it, I can tell you we did not,” Merriman said. “Regardless, as grant recipients we should have known.”

Even so, he called Devaney’s comments “uncalled for and not reflective of the intent of those accused.”