Reporters Probe a Federal Program Meant to Provide Jobs to Workers with Severe Disabilities - and Discover That the Contractors Are Reaping the Rewards.

The first season of AIR: AMERICA'S INVESTIGATIVE REPORTS concludes with Charity Begins at Home, premiering Friday, November 17 on PBS 

NEW YORK -- A tiny government agency has a well-intentioned mission: to channel federal contracts to non-profit groups that train and employ workers who are blind or have severe disabilities. Known as JWOD, the program is so obscure that even some members of Congress are unaware of its existence. But when journalists from The Oregonian exposed fraud by one of JWOD's biggest contractors, the program took on a much higher, if unwanted, profile.

The paper's investigative team recounts how it unraveled the story of a small non-profit that became a multi-million dollar business in Charity Begins At Home, the 12th episode of AIR: AMERICA'S INVESTIGATIVE REPORTS, premiering Friday, November 17 at 10 p.m. (ET) on PBS. Award-winning broadcast journalist Sylvia Chase narrates.

In the fall of 2004, The Oregonian reporter Jeff Kosseff learned about Javits-Wagner-O'Day (JWOD), a federal program created by Congress to encourage the employment of people who are blind or have severe disabilities. During a 10-month investigation, Kosseff and fellow Oregonian reporters Bryan Denson and Les Zaitz, along with photographer Faith Cathcart, uncovered widespread problems and anemic oversight of the little-known but burgeoning program. JWOD sets aside $2.25 billion of federal dollars annually to contract with non-profit companies at which 75% of the labor is performed by people who are blind or have severe disabilities. Yet the reporters found that not all the contractors were abiding by the law.

The situation was the most disturbing at the program's largest contractor, the El Paso, Texas-based National Center for the Employment of the Disabled (NCED). In fiscal year 2005 NCED received government contracts worth $276 million - over three times what the next biggest contractor was receiving. But The Oregonian's investigation revealed that NCED was employing very few workers who were blind or had severe disabilities. The reporters also uncovered evidence that NCED's President and CEO, Bob Jones, had engineered annual payments of over $4 million to his own family trust and the use of NCED funds to finance his outside business ventures.

The Oregonian analyzed tax statements for the 50 top-grossing non-profits in the JWOD program and discovered that "average pay and benefits for the top contractors' CEOs climbed 57 percent between 2000 and 2004, a period in which average hourly pay for their severely disabled workers increased 16 percent."

Elsewhere, the reporters found agencies whose employees clearly met the requirements for participation in the JWOD program, yet had been shut out of the federal contracts. The Oregonian further revealed that oversight of the federal program has been handed over to industry trade groups, which receive a percentage of each contract. In effect, this creates a conflict of interest: the same groups which are supposed to be the program's watchdogs are profiting from it.

Funders for AIR: AMERICA'S INVESTIGATIVE REPORTS include Bernard and Irene Schwartz, Park Foundation, The Popplestone Foundation, The Jacob Burns Foundation, The Betsy and Jesse Fink Foundation, Tracy and Eric Semler, and Scripps Howard Foundation.

AIR: AMERICA'S INVESTIGATIVE REPORTS is a production of Thirteen/WNET New York in association with the Center for Investigative Reporting. Stephen Segaller, director of news and public affairs programming at Thirteen, is executive-in-charge of AIR. Tom Casciato is executive producer. Scott Davis is senior producer.