Quick Picks focuses on a select few of the day’s stories from “Breaking on the Web.”

• Apparently, nothing is a more difficult quarry for the FBI investigator than the elusive piece of paper. Two out of three FOIA requesters to the agency are told the documents they seek do not exist, according to the folks at the National Security Archive.  The NSA says a faulty document search process is to blame for that failure rate, which is five times higher than other large federal agencies.


• Why did Medicare’s spending on home health care increase 44 percent in five years? According to the GAO, the answer is mostly large-scale fraud and abuse. Home health care providers visit homebound patients and help them with services like dressing wounds and administering medication, but unscrupulous providers have been overbilling, or performing unneeded work. In Miami-Dade County alone, billing for home services increased 1,300 percent between 2003 and 2008, now totaling more than $1 billion per year. To combat this problem, the GAO suggests criminal background checks and an expedited process for removing problem providers. Charlene Frizzera, acting administrator of CMS, which oversees Medicare, said they are working on the issue.

Check out more of our roundup of the best investigative stories around the Web.

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