Senior Research Reporter
Doris Burke is senior research reporter. Prior to joining ProPublica in 2019, she was a researcher at the New York Times working on investigative and daily stories. While at Fortune Magazine, she collaborated on award winning financial crime stories. Before moving to journalism, she was research librarian at several investment banks. She has a history degree from St. Bonaventure University and library science degree from Pratt Institute.
The IRS, the Justice Department and Congressional Republicans and Democrats are all trying to put an end to syndicated conservation easements. But with lobbyists like Henry Waxman helping lead the resistance, the efforts have had little effect.
Vladimir Putin has increasingly relied on the Wagner Group, a private and unaccountable army with a history of human rights violations, to pursue Russia’s foreign policy objectives across the globe.
The upgrade to 5G was supposed to bring a paradise of speedy wireless. But a chaotic process under the Trump administration, allowed to fester by the Biden administration, turned it into an epic disaster. The problems haven’t been solved.
Secret IRS files reveal the top US income earners and how their tax rates vary more than their incomes. Tech titans, hedge fund managers and heirs dominate the list, while the likes of Taylor Swift and LeBron James didn’t even make the top 400.
In the early 1900s some of the wealthiest Americans claimed their fortunes would never last through the generations. A century of tax avoidance later, the dynasties are going strong.
An alarming number of people (especially children) have drowned after disappearing into storm drains during floods. The deadly problem should be easy for federal, state and local government agencies to fix, but tragedy strikes again and again.
The United States’ inability to curb a treatable sexually transmitted disease shows the failures of a cash-strapped public health system. Increasingly, newborns are paying the price.
The 2017 tax cuts made it more attractive for certain company owners to be paid in profits instead of wages. Some cut their own wages, expanding a loophole that was already costing the U.S. billions.
Billionaire business owners deployed lobbyists to make sure Trump’s 2017 tax bill was tailored to their benefit. Confidential IRS records show the windfall that followed.
Roth IRAs were intended to help average working Americans save, but IRS records show Thiel and other ultrawealthy investors have used them to amass vast untaxed fortunes.
Tali Farhadian Weinstein, who donated $8 million to her own campaign, and her hedge fund manager husband paid nothing (or almost nothing) to the IRS four times in six years.
ProPublica has obtained a vast cache of IRS information showing how billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett pay little in income tax compared to their massive wealth — sometimes, even nothing.
These powerful donors, who each contributed more than $1 million, shied away from party politics before Trump. What brought them off the sidelines?
New research shows that California’s climate policy created up to 39 million carbon credits that aren’t achieving real carbon savings. But companies can buy these forest offsets to justify polluting more anyway.
The cyberbreach at a plant in Oldsmar, Florida, which could have resulted in a mass poisoning, was a reminder of a disturbing reality: Despite a decade of warnings, thousands of water systems around the country are still at risk.
The software company SolarWinds unwittingly allowed hackers’ code into thousands of federal computers. A cybersecurity system called in-toto, which the government paid to develop but never required, might have protected against this.
Chats from a private Telegram group obtained by ProPublica show how a suspect tied to the Jan. 6 insurrection tried to organize a self-styled militia. The hidden proliferation of such groups worries experts.
The “King of Debt” promised to reduce the national debt — then his tax cuts made it surge. Add in the pandemic, and he oversaw the third-biggest deficit increase of any president.
Two years after the Trump administration walked away from charging Walmart criminally for its role in the opioid crisis, the DOJ is back, making the same claims but seeking softer penalties.
Prospect Medical, which mostly serves low-income patients, has suffered a litany of problems: broken elevators, dirty surgical gear, bedbugs and more. Its owners, including Leonard Green & Partners and Prospect’s CEO, have cashed in.
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