SYRACUSE, N.Y. — The temperature outside barely reached double digits on the morning of Jan. 15, 2009, and, inside the Crucible Specialty Metals steel mill here, it was bitterly cold. Ice coated the equipment, forcing employees to use torches to free the machines so they could start their work.

Danger was everywhere, federal records show. Equipment was old and in disrepair. Molten steel snaked through the building, and, at any moment, could snag and twist out of control, burning anything in its path. Shafts driving the machines that compress the steel spun at high speeds with no guards to shield employees working nearby. Sometimes, workers said, the torches backfired and burned them.

This was Jack Grobsmith’s domain. He’d worked at Crucible for more than 35 years and had ascended to the position of head roller. He adjusted the equipment and made sure the steel bars came out just the right size. Around the factory, he was known as a jokester with a purpose — showing up at events in character as Crucibella, donning a dress, lipstick and ‘60s-era Easter hat to preach about safety.

That frigid January morning, Grobsmith went to one of the stands that compresses steel to hook up a water hose. Next to him, two rotating shafts driven by a 900-horse-power motor spun at 240 revolutions per minute. Grobsmith struggled with the hose, which was covered in grease, then slipped on ice coating the area.

The shafts pulled him in, crushed his body and shot him out the other side.

Grobsmith’s assistant roller and longtime friend Rocky Saccone ran over. “It just happened so fast,” recalled Saccone, who retired a few months later. “We pulled him out, and that was it.”

The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited Crucible for more than 70 violations and levied almost $250,000 in fines — high numbers for an agency with relatively little power to impose harsh penalties.

What almost no one outside of OSHA has known until now: The agency never collected a penny for Grobsmith’s death because it failed to file paperwork in time after Crucible filed for bankruptcy.

The company’s bankruptcy case drew significant media coverage because of the economic impact on the community. Yet OSHA, which has an office based in Syracuse, said in a written statement to the Center for Public Integrity that it didn’t learn Crucible was in bankruptcy until March 2010. By then, it was too late to file as a creditor and try to collect. OSHA said collection would have been difficult even if it had filed.

A private equity firm bought the company’s assets and reopened the mill — calling it Crucible Industries— with most of the same management. The penalty simply disappeared.

OSHA never told Grobsmith’s wife, Sue. After hearing the news from a reporter, more than three-and-a-half years after her husband’s death, she fanned herself with her hands. “I’m blown away by the fact that Crucible never paid any fines,” she said several moments later. “OSHA doesn’t feel the need to bring that out?”

Crucible has not responded to repeated requests for comment.

The events in Syracuse are part of the largely untold story of what happens after a workplace death has faded from memory and OSHA struggles to hold employers accountable. Though OSHA trumpets announced penalties as evidence of its commitment to forcing companies to follow the law, what actually happens to these penalties is more complicated.

Even after investigating a death and issuing a penalty, federal OSHA or the state agencies it oversees have failed to collect any of the original fine in one of every 10 cases since 2001, the Center found. In many other cases, regulators have settled for a fraction of the penalty initially imposed.

Overall, the federal and state agencies have collected at least 40 percent of the monetary penalties initially assessed after workplace inspections, forgoing $1.3 billion in the process, a Center data analysis found.

Most overdue debts end up at a private collection agency under contract with the Treasury Department. Yet a Center analysis of Treasury Department data found that only about 12 percent of OSHA debts have been collected in recent years. The penalties OSHA is allowed by law to impose are significantly lower than those assessed by many other enforcement agencies, providing little incentive for the government or collection agencies to prioritize them.

Both OSHA and the Treasury Department can ask the Justice Department to take an employer to court, but data show relatively little money has been collected this way.

Worker advocates say such failures to collect undermine enforcement.

“The penalties matter,” said Peg Seminario, director of safety and health at the AFL-CIO. Not collecting, she said, “basically means that they can violate the law and have very few consequences.”

OSHA does face substantial hurdles. The agency can’t force an employer to fix a hazard while a citation is contested, and litigation can drag for years. OSHA sometimes settles by deleting violations and erasing or reducing penalties — accepting, in some cases, company pledges to make safety improvements.

Even when a penalty becomes final, the agency may not be able to collect. Sometimes an employer disappears or convinces the government it doesn’t have the money. Other times, an employer goes out of business or declares bankruptcy, then forms a new company and continues similar work — a path that is difficult to track and requires legal heavy lifting to combat, OSHA said in a statement.

In its statement, OSHA said it is doing what it can with the authority it has, but it supports legislation that “would give OSHA the tools to impose appropriate penalties to increase deterrence and save lives.”

Data and cases from across the country show how penalties can wither or disappear, even after workers are needlessly killed.

A death, a debt and a drawn-out process

Algo Escalante Cota had worked in the U.S. for less than a year when, during a roofing job, he crashed through a skylight and plummeted almost 20 feet to a concrete floor below.

The fine for his death spent the next six years winding through a bureaucratic maze that led from Alabama to Washington, D.C., to a New York-based private collection agency, then back again. In the end, the government collected $0.

Cota, a 39-year-old native of Mexico, found his way to Birmingham, Ala., where he worked for Tony Wright, owner of roofing contractor Integrity Building Services LLC. Wright found Cota and another worker at a congregating spot that Hispanic workers called “La Tiendita,” an OSHA report said.

“There Mr. Wright knew he could hire Hispanic workers which, compared to American workers, would work for lower wages and who were not trained on the safety and health hazards associated with roofing work,” an OSHA inspector wrote.

Wright brought the men with him on a hot June day in 2005 to repair a leaking roof at a door manufacturing facility in Montgomery. Late in the afternoon of the second day on the job, Cota was lugging two five-gallon buckets of roof sealer when he stepped on a skylight. The fiberglass gave way, and he fell through to the factory floor.

The OSHA inspector cited Wright for failing to cover or guard the skylight and for failing to provide proper fall protection.

Wright had been an officer and co-owner of another business, Superior Roofing Contractors Inc., that had been cited repeatedly for violating fall protection rules. In an interview with the Center, Wright said he negotiated with OSHA on the company’s behalf after at least one of those inspections. The company went out of business, Wright said, and he formed Integrity Building Services.

The scene of Cota’s accident troubled the inspector, records show. Arriving the day after the accident, he spotted pieces of plywood covering two of the skylights, including the one through which Cota fell. There were also stanchions — stands to mark off dangerous areas on the roof — and a poster board containing safety information for temporary workers.

Wright told the inspector the items had been at the scene before Cota’s accident, according to the OSHA report. But the other worker and the plant’s owner said Wright hadn’t brought the items until after the accident. The inspector believed it was “an effort to deceive OSHA.”

In an interview, Wright acknowledged bringing the equipment to the scene after the accident, but insisted, “That was not to fool anybody.” The plywood and stanchions were temporary protection to make sure no one fell in the hole left by Cota’s accident, he said. Asked why he brought the poster board, he said, “That’s been a while. … I don’t know.”

Wright contested all of the citations, which included one classified as “willful” – the most severe type OSHA can allege, signifying that the agency believes the employer intentionally violated the law or acted with “plain indifference” to it.

“The proper safety guidelines were in place,” Wright told the Center, noting that he had spray-painted lines around the skylights. “The proper training had been performed. Daily communication on safety was done. The workman ignored the safety that was in place for him.”

In 2006, the $48,750 penalty for Cota’s death began its trek through the system. The head of the local office that investigated the death urged a Labor Department lawyer to pursue the full penalty to “achieve the appropriate deterrent effect.” When the department filed its complaint in administrative court, Wright did not respond. Upholding the OSHA citations, a judge concluded Wright had acted “with disdain” for the court’s rules.

Wright told the Center he had limited resources and had to pick his battles, so he chose to fight what he viewed as the more serious threat, a lawsuit by Cota’s family.

The waiting game

Faced with such an employer, OSHA has a standard procedure: The local office issues a letter demanding payment, then waits one month. Then the national office issues a similar letter, then waits. When the debt has gone unpaid for 180 days, OSHA refers it to the Treasury Department, which issues its own letter, then waits, usually another month. The department also can try to intercept government payments to the employer, such as tax refunds or payments for contract work.

Ultimately, most OSHA debts end up where Integrity Building Service’s did: a private collection agency. Four companies have contracts with the Treasury Department, and they do the bulk of the work pursuing debtors, said Ronda Kent, a deputy assistant commissioner in the department’s Financial Management Service.

Under the program, the Treasury Department is charged with collecting anything from debts on government loans to penalties assessed by a host of enforcement agencies.

OSHA debts, however, are typically much smaller than those of other enforcement agencies, and it is one of few federal agencies excluded from a law that allows penalties to rise with inflation, with penalties the agency can impose stuck at 1990 levels. A violation deemed “serious” — one that, by OSHA’s definition, “would most likely result in death or serious physical harm” — carries a maximum penalty of $7,000.

“Just because something’s a low dollar amount, it could be a fine that it’s important to collect it because you certainly don’t want repeat offenders,” Treasury’s Kent said. “You don’t want to make it cost-beneficial for the businesses to continue to violate the law.”

There’s no requirement, though, that this attitude trickle down to the private collection agencies. When it is assigned a debt, an agency must send a letter demanding payment. Beyond that, the agency can choose which debts are worth pursuing. “We leave that to them to make those decisions,” Kent said, noting that the agencies are regularly evaluated.

Between the 2006 and 2012 fiscal years, OSHA referred about $131 million in debts to the Treasury Department, but only about $16 million was collected. Data to compare OSHA collections with other agencies was not available.

Likewise, it is relatively rare for an employer to end up in court and be ordered  to pay an OSHA debt. During the seven-year period, the Justice Department collected just over $267,000 in OSHA debts referred to it by Treasury. OSHA can also refer debts directly to the Justice Department. Since 2008, the department has collected about $910,000 in debts sent to it by OSHA. For all federal agencies, the Justice Department collected about $15.4 billion between the 2008 and 2011 fiscal years.

“It’s a problem,” said the AFL-CIO’s Seminario, “but the government has limitations in terms of what it can do, both in terms of its authority and in terms of its resources. … It’s making choices. It isn’t necessarily that they’re ignoring these cases.”

Legislation that would increase both civil and criminal penalties was introduced in both houses of Congress in 2009 and 2011. The bills haven’t made it out of committee.

In Cota’s death, the private collection agency Pioneer Credit Recovery called Wright a few times trying to collect, Wright recalled. He told them he was fighting a private lawsuit, and Wright said a Pioneer employee suggested he write a letter and “ask for forgiveness” of the debt. Wright’s lawyer did so.

“Debtor attorney states is in process of settlement agreement in court,” Pioneer reported back to the government. The head of OSHA’s debt collection office replied that getting sued doesn’t mean an employer can avoid paying a penalty. Still, an invitation to negotiate stood out in bold, underlined text: “In an effort to assist the debtor in settling this debt, OSHA is willing to review a reasonable compromise offer for this debt.”

On June 13, 2011, OSHA’s debt collection office said Treasury had deemed the debt “uncollectible.” The case was being closed. Pioneer refused repeated requests for comment, and the Treasury Department declined to answer questions about the specific debt, citing privacy concerns.

“We are disturbed that no penalties were collected in this case,” OSHA responded to a Center inquiry. The agency’s Mobile, Ala., office “has been on alert,” and, if future violations occur, OSHA “will pursue action to the extent of the law to hold this employer accountable.”

Wright, 57, said he still works in the Birmingham area as a consultant to a construction contractor. Integrity Building Services still exists, he said, though it is not taking jobs and is winding down its legal obligations as it prepares to go out of business. The company doesn’t have the assets to pay the OSHA fine, he said.

“Even if we had had the money,” he said, “I would have refused to pay.”

Negotiations, deletions and more deaths in South Texas

Some cases never make it to the collection stage. After OSHA investigates a death and issues citations, it is often faced with a choice: The agency can push to uphold all the violations and penalties, a process that can involve years of litigation. Or it can negotiate a settlement, which often involves reducing penalties or reclassifying violations.

Another option is deleting violations entirely, erasing the penalties that go with them. In more than 600 cases since 2001, OSHA has investigated a death, issued violations carrying a penalty — and then deleted them all, the Center found. That occurred in roughly one in every 20 cases.

In all closed cases since 2001, OSHA has agreed to delete more than 104,000 violations that had an initial fine, erasing more than $240 million in penalties.

“There are occasional instances when, after citations are issued, an employer may present additional evidence to indicate that a citation is not warranted,” OSHA said. “If that evidence, when taken into account, persuades the agency that a citation was not warranted, the citation may be deleted.”

Mark Lies, a partner in the Chicago office of the law firm Seyfarth Shaw LLP, is among the lawyers who specialize in squaring off against OSHA. Lies said he often gets involved soon after an accident occurs and has communications come to him, creating an attorney-client privilege. He sits in on employee interviews with OSHA, if the employee chooses, and reviews OSHA’s requests for documents.

Employers often fight even small OSHA penalties because having a violation on record could open up a company to more severe penalties in the future and haunt it in related civil lawsuits, said Julie Pace, a senior member at the Cavanagh Law Firm in Arizona.

There are many ways to attack an OSHA citation, lawyers say. A lawyer could argue that the OSHA standard cited didn’t apply to the work in question, that no one was actually exposed to the danger or that employee misconduct was to blame, among other defenses.

And if OSHA is unwilling to compromise, Lies said, “it’s very easy for the employer to go to a judge.”

A stark example of a company’s ability to beat back OSHA citations has played out in South Texas.

Gulf Stream Marine loads and unloads ships at ports along the Gulf Coast. In Houston and Brownsville, the company experienced six fatal accidents from 2007 to 2011. OSHA investigated and issued violations in each case, but, in half of them, agreed to delete all of the violations and erase the penalties.

The accidents bore similarities, OSHA records show. In January 2007, a Houston Gulf Stream Marine employee — not certified to drive a fork truck — ran into a security guard with the pipes being carried on the truck, causing fatal chest wounds. Three months later, also in Houston, a bundle of pipes being lifted by crane knocked a worker into the side of a ship. He fell into the water and never surfaced.

In 2008, a worker in Houston was crushed by a truck that came loose from the crane loading it onto a ship. The next year, in Brownsville, a large chain suspended from a crane got stuck, then snapped loose and hit a worker in the head, killing him. An employee in Houston was run over by a truck in 2010, and, the following year, a truck driver in Brownsville was hit with a 40-ton metal beam and killed.

In one case, OSHA deleted two serious violations carrying a $9,800 penalty after Gulf Stream Marine’s safety director sent the agency a map showing the areas of the port leased by the company and the areas controlled by the Port of Brownsville. A spot labeled “incident site” showed the accident occurred just outside the area under Gulf Stream Marine’s control. OSHA noted in the file, “The evidence suggests Gulf Stream Marine … had no controlling authority over safety and health.” The citations vanished.

In another case, OSHA deleted two serious violations carrying a $10,000 fine because “there were issues” with the phrasing of the regulations cited, OSHA told the Center. In a third case, OSHA deleted two serious violations and a $10,000 fine in a settlement. OSHA said it got something in return — a company pledge to adopt a new policy.

Others who have dealt with Gulf Stream Marine have been less forgiving than OSHA. “We’re getting people killed out there for no reason,” said George Gavito, who recently retired as chief of the Port of Brownsville’s police department.

Gavito said he constantly clashed with the company over safety issues. Brownsville is near the Mexican border, and many workers are poor immigrants, he said. “They’re not going to raise hell,” he said.

Lawyer Bill Tinning has battled Gulf Stream Marine twice. In 2005, he represented a worker who was offloading large pipes from a truck when one came loose and crushed his head, leaving him in a vegetative state.

In 2003, he sued on behalf of the family of a worker who had been crushed to death by a load that came loose from a crane Gulf Stream Marine was operating. Tinning alleged in court filings that the company replaced key parts of the crane immediately after the accident, started disposing of the crane even though there was an ongoing OSHA investigation and withheld information about the accident — claiming that one investigator Tinning wanted to depose was a “non-existent person.”

“It was the most outrageous conduct I’ve run across,” Tinning said.

Gulf Stream Marine refused repeated requests for comment. The company contested the violations in each of the six deaths and, in settlement agreements, has denied breaking the law.

OSHA defended its handling of Gulf Stream Marine, saying “violations have been abated that could have lingered for years had we not settled the cases.”

The agency acknowledged, however, that officials in Houston had failed to flag the inspection of the 2008 death as meeting the criteria for the agency’s “Enhanced Enforcement Program.” Had they done so, there would have been required follow-up inspections and perhaps visits to other company sites. These inspections, OSHA said, might have prevented future accidents.

John Newquist, a former assistant regional administrator for OSHA who retired this year, said Gulf Stream Marine’s record and OSHA’s handling of the death cases “should trigger maybe an outside review of it because there’s something wrong.”

“This should never happen,” he said. “It’s an embarrassment if you’ve got fatality cases and citations deleted.”

‘I think about it a lot’

Every Monday morning at 6:30, the management and employees at Crucible Specialty Metals met to talk safety. Speaking for the workers on the mill floor often fell to Rocky Saccone, who embraced the role. “They would say, ‘Rock’s on a roll; let him go,’ ” Saccone recalled. “It would be days or weeks or months before they would address these issues on the mill, and they wonder why you get upset. It was like pulling teeth.”

One issue that repeatedly surfaced, he said, was installing guards to enclose the rotating shafts on the mill — like the ones that crushed Jack Grobsmith. “It should have been corrected years and years ago,” he said.

A few years before Grobsmith’s death, Saccone said he nearly suffered the same fate when the sleeve of his shirt touched an unguarded shaft. “It ripped it right off in about half a second,” he recalled. “All that was left was the collar of my shirt. The rest of the shirt was disintegrated.”

Then, in May 2008, another worker’s shirt was caught in an unguarded bar straightener, federal records show. He was flipped over and injured. OSHA investigated and issued a citation. By that time, OSHA had already cited the company multiple times – in 1997 and again in 2002 – for failing to have machines guarded. An inspector noted portentously in 2002, “Potentially an employee could trip or slip … and be caught in the two rollers.”

Though OSHA said Crucible fixed the specific problem cited in 2008, the agency told the Center: “The company should have installed guards on similar machines throughout the plant.” Had Crucible done so, “this may have prevented” Grobsmith’s death, OSHA wrote.

In 2009, OSHA’s Syracuse area director authorized the maximum fine for violations related to Grobsmith’s death “to get the necessary deterrent effect,” he wrote in a memo, noting the company’s history of accidents and failure to guard machines.

Three days after a judge approved the settlement between Crucible Specialty Metals and OSHA, a private equity firm finalized its purchase of the company. A few months later, OSHA received a letter, this time on Crucible Industries letterhead, saying it would take longer than initially agreed to fix the problems inspectors found. The company “does not admit it bears responsibility for any citations and penalties … issued to and incurred by the previous owners.” It maintained it was correcting cited hazards “in the interest of providing of Crucible Industries’ employees a safe workplace.”

Both the settlement agreement and the letter were signed by the same person.

Crucible employees said that, with new owners, there have been safety signs both positive and negative. “I want to believe that the people up top want the cultural change and want it to work, but I’m not sure it filtered all the way down,” said Ed Moran, the safety chairman for the United Steelworkers’ local.

After her husband’s death, Sue Grobsmith considered a lawsuit. Because of state workers’ compensation laws, she couldn’t sue Crucible; her lawyer’s only option was to investigate the contractors who installed the equipment. Crucible, however, said it couldn’t find any of the contracts. “Clearly, Crucible … was to blame,” the lawyer wrote to her. “Unfortunately, with all of this evidence against the employer, we still can’t sue them.”

Now 59, Sue works for the local school district and keeps in touch with Jack’s friends from Crucible. One recent fall day, Saccone and Dave Peel, another longtime friend from Crucible, sat with Sue in the living room of the house she and Jack bought 32 years ago, drinking coffee and talking about Jack.

Sue and Jack started dating in 1969, in high school. “Right out of high school, I worked for Allstate Insurance, Jack went to school and we knew we were going to get married,” Sue said. When Jack finished at a two-year college, he planned to go back to school and become a teacher and coach. Yet a summer job at Crucible changed his mind; the promise of a good paycheck enticed him.

They married in 1972 and had three children. As Jack ascended the ranks at Crucible, double shifts became common. He became close with co-workers, sharing barbecues, graduations, weddings.

“He’d have me in tears at times because he’d be so damn funny,” Rocky said. “It could be an old, stale joke that I would still laugh at after 30 years.”

Inevitably, the conversation returned to Jan. 15, 2009. As Rocky described running to Jack’s battered body, Sue’s expression changed. “I didn’t know that you were the first there,” she said, grabbing his hand. “Thanks, Rock.”

Rocky paused, and his eyes welled. “I think about it a lot,” he said. “I still do. I think about it a lot.”

The Center for Public Integrity’s analysis relies on data from multiple sources, including the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Treasury Department and the Justice Department. Using the Freedom of Information Act, the Center obtained an extract of OSHA’s master database of inspection records, known as the Integrated Management Information System, or IMIS. The portion received by the Center contains information about more than 1 million workplace safety and health inspections conducted from Jan. 1, 2001, to the date in early August 2012 when the data were provided.

In analyzing both penalties initially imposed by OSHA and penalties ultimately collected, the Center used only cases considered “closed” by the agency. This excluded some recent cases in which an employer may still be contesting violations or in which OSHA, the Treasury Department or another entity is still attempting to collect a fine. When calculating penalties initially imposed, the Center included violations and their accompanying fines that were later deleted as part of settlement negotiations or the litigation process.

The Treasury Department agreed to provide data on OSHA debts collected under its cross-servicing program for the fiscal years 2006 to 2012. Collection rates were calculated using the total amount collected and the total amount referred in a given year. Data that would trace individual debts across years was not available.

Referrals of OSHA debts to the Justice Department can come from either OSHA or the Treasury Department. Data on such referrals by the Treasury Department was included in what the department provided. The Center obtained data on the cases referred by OSHA under a Freedom of Information Act request with the Justice Department. The department’s data went back only to 2008. Collections for all agencies by the Justice Department are contained in annual reports to Congress by the Treasury Department’s Financial Management Service.

Billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and family poured nearly $40 million into the coffers of GOP-aligned super PACs In the final three weeks of the 2012 campaign, bringing their total giving to the groups to more than $93 million.

Adelson ranks as the top donor to the outside spending groups by a wide margin, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of campaign finance records.

Super PACs raised roughly $830 million in the 2012 election, with conservative groups accounting for about 60 percent of the total, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

By contrast, President Barack Obama’s presidential campaign raised nearly $720 million and Republican challenger Mitt Romney’s raised almost $450 million, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

In all, the top 25 super PAC super donors doled out more than $310 million, about 37 percent of all super PAC receipts, according to the Center’s analysis of data from the FEC and Center for Responsive Politics. Ninety-one individuals gave at least $1 million to super PACs and collectively donated more than $330 million, according to the analysis.

The unlimited donations, which are used primarily to fund candidate attack ads, concern advocates such as Stephen Spaulding, staff counsel at Common Cause.

“People are able to distort the political process, open doors and be kingmakers simply because of the size of their bank account,” he said. “The threat of the spending just hangs over all the political decisions that are happening on [Capitol] Hill.”

After focusing primarily on the presidential contest, in the final weeks of the campaign, Adelson ramped up his giving to GOP-aligned super PACs active in House and Senate races.

In Virginia alone, Adelson invested $4 million into a super PAC that ran attack ads against Democrat Tim Kaine in the final days of the election.

His million-dollar contribution to a super PAC called the “Hardworking Americans Committee” accounted for the bulk of the money used in an unsuccessful last-ditch effort to defeat incumbent Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich.

And a GOP-aligned super PAC known as the “America 360 Committee” received $500,000 from the Adelsons as it touted incumbent Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., and criticized Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren in telephone calls and mailings.

Despite the spending, however, Democrats prevailed in the most contentious races — including battles for U.S. Senate seats in Massachusetts and Virginia.

Adelson’s donations to super PACs — which can accept unlimited donations from individuals, corporations and unions — set a new standard in political giving.

Texas businessman Harold Simmons, the billionaire owner of Contran Corp., ranked a distant second among super donors, giving $30.9 million, including donations from his company and wife, Annette Simmons.

One of Simmons' business ventures includes a site in West Texas built to store nuclear waste. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is currently debating rules that could result in sizeable contracts for Simmons' company.

Another Texan, millionaire Bob Perry, ranked third, giving $23.5 million to conservative super PACs. Perry is the owner of Perry Homes and an advocate for the business-led effort to limit damages awarded in lawsuits.

Millionaires and billionaires pepper the Center’s list of the top 25 super donors. The list also includes seven unions and the Republican Governors Association, a so-called “527 committee” that used a super PAC to direct funds into state races. None of these donors broke the $20 million mark.

Billionaire New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, No. 9, was a new addition to the list. Bloomberg gave more than $10 million to a group he launched called Independence USA PAC, whose priorities include stronger gun control laws and marriage equality for same-sex couples.

Other new additions to the Center’s list of top donors include:

• William S. Rose, Jr., No. 6, the 61-year-old attorney tied to two companies that gave more than $12 million to conservative super PAC FreedomWorks for America since the beginning of October;
• the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, No. 12 at $8.2 million;
• the American Federation of Teachers, No. 15 at $5.8 million; and
• the United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing, Pipefitting and Sprinkler Fitting Industry, tied for 23rd at $4.2 million.

Rose’s companies — Specialty Investments Group, Inc., and Kingston Pike Development, LLC— both list their address as Rose’s $634,000 private home outside of Knoxville, Tenn. Both were registered with the state of Tennessee in late September, and neither have websites.

Rose, after intense press scrutiny, went public saying Specialty’s mission is to "buy, sell, develop and invest in a variety of real estate ventures and investments." Rose released a lengthy press release, but did not indicate where the money for the donations originated.

Rose did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

The top Democratic-aligned super donor was Chicago media mogul Fred Eychaner, who gave $14.1 million over the course of the election cycle, split among five groups. That sum earned him the No. 4 spot on the Center’s top 25 list.

The pro-Obama Priorities USA Action super PAC collected $4.5 million from Eychaner, ranking as his top beneficiary. He also backed Majority PAC, House Majority PAC, Women Vote!, the super PAC of abortion rights advocacy group EMILY’s List, and America Votes Action Fund, a super PAC that funded get-out-the-vote efforts.

Liberal billionaire hedge fund manager George Soros* made it on the list, donating about $2.8 million split among four Democratic groups. His children Andrea, Alexander and Jonathan also each donated six-figure sums to Democratic super PACs, as did his daughter-in-law Melissa, bringing the family’s total giving to $5.1 million, enough to rank 18th.

Soros' children collectively gave $1.1 million to the pro-campaign finance reform super PAC "Friends of Democracy," which was launched by Jonathan Soros.

This is a far cry from the $23.7 million Soros donated during the 2004 election to 527 groups — the predecessors of super PACs — when he ranked as the top 527 committee financier, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Despite fears to the contrary, donations from blue-chip corporations were rare, although a month before the election, Chevron, the third-largest American company according to Forbes, donated $2.5 million to a Republican super PAC closely allied with House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.

One of the largest, high-profile corporate donors was Weaver Holdings, the parent company of the Indiana-popcorn company known for its brands “Pop Weaver” and “Trail’s End,” which is sold by Boy Scouts across the country. Weaver Holdings, along with Weaver Popcorn, donated $3.4 million to American Crossroads, including $1 million during the final three weeks of the election.

American Crossroads was co-founded by GOP strategists Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie.

Unlike traditional political action committees, there is no limit on contributions to super PACs. They emerged following the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and a federal court ruling called SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission.

Adelson is a staunch ally of Israel and an opponent of unions. He first hit the news when he and his relatives pumped more than $16 million into a super PAC that supported former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s failed bid for the Republican nomination for president.

He and his wife Miriam gave $30 million to the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future, which accounted for nearly 20 percent of the nearly $154 million raised by the group.

In late October, the Adelsons also gave $23 million to American Crossroads, their first donations to the group. Crossroads spent more than $90 million in an unsuccessful effort to help Romney oust Obama.

Roughly two-thirds of Adelson’s $93 million went to super PACs that backed just one or two specific candidates. None of Adelson’s preferred candidates prevailed in any of the 10 races in which these super PACs were active.

Earlier this month, a defiant Adelson told the Wall Street Journalthat he would spend even more money in future elections.

"I happen to be in a unique business where winning and losing is the basis of the entire business," Adelson told the newspaper. "I don't cry when I lose. There's always a new hand coming up."

*George Soros is the chairman of the Open Society Foundation, which provides funding for the Center for Public Integrity. For a list of the Center's donors, visit this page on our website.

Ranking: 21

Total contributions to super PACs: $4.4 million*

• $3.4 million to American Crossroads (pro-Republican), including $850,000 from his company, Alliance Management Holdings
• $1 million to Restore Our Future (pro-Mitt Romney)

Federal hard money contributions:

Not including his super PAC contributions, Craft, along with his ex-wife, Kathy, has donated more than $800,000 to federal candidates, party committees, business PACs and other political committees since the 1998 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, including:

• $170,700 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee
• $79,500 to the Republican Party of Kentucky
• $71,600 to the National Republican Congressional Committee
• $59,500 to the National Mining Association PAC
• $57,000 to the Democratic National Committee
• $50,000 to the Democratic Party of Kentucky
• $50,000 to Alliance Resource Partners’ corporate PAC
• $31,950 to the Republican National Committee

Corporate names: Alliance Holdings GP, L.P.; Alliance Resource Partners, L.P.; Alliance Resource GP, LLC; Alliance Management Holdings; Alliance Management Holdings III LLC; MAPCO Coal Inc.

Total spent on federal lobbying (2007-2011): No record of corporate spending at the federal level, but the company has lobbied in the states and is a member of trade organizations that lobby.

Lobbying issues: N/A

Biography:

Wealthy coal executive Joseph W. Craft III was one of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s finance co-chairs in Kentucky, Craft’s home state.

Craft’s Alliance Resource Partners, L.P. operates 11 mining complexes in five states — Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia and Maryland. The company also operates a coal-loading terminal on the Ohio River in Indiana.

In 2011, it produced more than 30 million tons of coal, ranking it the third largest coal producer in the eastern United States. Its revenues exceeded $1.8 billion, up 14.5 percent from 2010, a year that saw two miners die after a roof collapsed in one of the company’s Kentucky mines. (The Associated Pressnoted at the time that the mine had been cited for 840 safety violations since January 2009.)

Craft, who has expressed doubts about whether humans are causing climate change, is also a board member of the National Mining Association, a director of the Tulsa-based BOK Financial Corp., a director of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity and a former chairman of the National Coal Council.

 In a 2010 documentary, Craft said the future of the coal industry depends on “what happens in elections,” adding that the only thing that impedes the industry’s growth was “bad public policy.”

Craft, who resides in Tulsa, Okla., got his start in the coal business with a company called MAPCO Coal Inc., which was the predecessor of Alliance Resource Partners, L.P. (ARLP).

At MAPCO, Craft rose through the ranks serving in roles including general counsel, chief financial officer and, ultimately, president. Since August 1999, he has been the president, chief executive officer and a director of ARLP.

ARLP’s structure is unusual. It is what’s known as a publicly traded “master limited partnership,” and consists of several interlocking corporate entities.

Records show that Craft owns 43 percent of ARLP, as well as 72 percent of Alliance Holdings GP, L.P., the limited partnership formed to own and control Alliance Resource Management GP, LLC, which is the managing general partner of ARLP.

In March, Forbesestimated Craft’s net worth to be $1.4 billion, including the assets of his ex-wife, Kathy. They divorced in late 2011.

Over the years, Craft has been a prolific political and philanthropic donor, particularly to his alma mater, the University of Kentucky.

“I’ve been fortunate to have been able to have the ability to give,” Craft said in an interview with Kentucky’s PBS affiliate that aired in 2010. “I want the state of Kentucky to be the best it can be. I want America to be the best it can be.”

Last updated: Dec. 20, 2012

*2011-2012 election cycle. Source: Center for Responsive Politics and Center for Public Integrity analysis of Federal Election Commission records. Totals include contributions from individuals, family members and corporations that are controlled by the individual super donor.

Ranking: 6

Total contributions to super PACs: $12.1 million*

• $12.1 million to FreedomWorks for America (pro-conservative)

Federal hard money and 527 contributions: $0

Corporate names: Specialty Investments Group, Inc. (formerly known as Specialty Group, Inc.); Kingston Pike Development, LLC; and Americana RoseCraft, LLC

Total spent on federal lobbying (2007-2011): $0

Lobbying issues: N/A

Biography:

A new corporate mega-donor called “Specialty Group, Inc.” splashed onto the scene during the final stretch of the 2012 campaign. Between Oct. 1 and Oct. 11, the Knoxville, Tenn.-based company contributed nearly $5.3 million to the conservative super PAC FreedomWorks for America. By Election Day, that amount increased to almost $10.6 million.

Sixty-one-year-old attorney William S. Rose, Jr., serves as Specialty’s CEO, president and general counsel. Rose’s $634,000 home — about a 30-minute drive from downtown Knoxville in a subdivision called Montgomery Cove — is listed as the company’s “principal office.”

Business records show that Specialty Group registered with the Tennessee Secretary of State on Sept. 26. On Nov. 28, the company changed its name to “Specialty Investments Group, Inc.”

In late October, another of Rose’s companies, Kingston Pike Development, LLC, donated an additional $1.5 million to FreedomWorks for America. Records show the company was created on Sept. 27, a day after Rose registered Specialty.

The two companies accounted for 52 percent of the $23 million that the tea party-aligned super PAC raised through mid-November. When asked about the donations by Mother Jones, former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey — who until recently was the head of FreedomWorks — pleaded ignorance: "I know nothing about this," Armey said.

Records are scant about both of Rose’s organizations, though in a six-page press release dated Nov. 3, Rose stated that Specialty’s purpose was to "buy, sell, develop and invest in a variety of real estate ventures and investments." Beyond that, Rose said he would not elaborate.

“The business of Specialty Group is my 'family secret,' a secret that will be kept — as allowed by applicable law — for at least another 50 years,” he wrote.

On Dec. 20, the Campaign Legal Center and Democracy 21, two campaign finance reform groups, filed complaints with the Federal Election Commission and Department of Justice allegedly that Specialty and Kingston Pike were "straw companies" created to obscure the true source of political contributions from the public.

Last updated: Dec. 20, 2012

*2011-2012 election cycle. Source: Center for Responsive Politics and Center for Public Integrity analysis of Federal Election Commission records. Totals include contributions from individuals, family members and corporations that are controlled by the individual super donor.

Ranking: 12

Total contributions to super PACs: $8.2 million*

• $3.9 million to Workers’ Voice (pro-Democratic), formerly known as AFL-CIO Workers’ Voices PAC
• $1 million to Majority PAC (pro-Democratic)
• $660,000 to America Votes Action Fund (pro-Democratic)
• $575,000 to American Bridge 21st Century (pro-Democratic)
• $565,000 to House Majority PAC (pro-Democratic)
• $530,000 to Moving Ohio Forward Action Fund (pro-Democratic)
• $250,000 to Priorities USA Action (pro-Barack Obama)
• $125,000 to Iowans for Intergrity in Leadership (pro-Democratic)
• $100,000 to Fair Share Action (pro-Democratic)
• $100,000 to Patriot Majority PAC (pro-Democratic)
• $100,000 Committee to Elect an Effective Valley Congressman (pro-Howard Berman)
• $54,900 to Working for Us PAC (pro-Democratic)
• $50,000 to The American Worker (pro-Democratic)
• $50,000 to Sierra Club Independent Action (pro-environment)
• $50,000 to Ohio Families United (pro-Democratic)
• $42,500 to Defend Our Homes (pro-Democratic)
• $10,000 to Protecting America's Retirees (union-aligned)
• $8,650 to Connecticut's Future PAC (pro-Democratic)
• $5,000 to Young Democrats of America (pro-Democratic)

Notable federal hard money and 527 contributions:

• Nearly $2.1 million in PAC donations to Democratic candidates during the 2012 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics
• $2.3 million in PAC donations to Democratic candidates during the 2010 election cycle.

Notable state-level contributions (see here):

• $104,000 to Democratic candidates in Texas (2012)
• $14,000 to Democratic candidates running in Kansas (2010)

Total spent on federal lobbying 2007-2012 (see here): $15 million

Lobbying issues: Education, federal budget, environment, labor, health care.

Biography:

The American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees represents more than 1.4 million laborers, ranging from clerical government workers to nurses in public hospitals. The organization is made up of 3,400 local union and affiliates in 46 states.

AFSCME is a member of the greater umbrella organization, the AFL-CIO, whose super PAC arm — Workers’ Voice — received nearly $4 million in contributions from the union this election cycle.

Overall, AFSCME gave $8.2 million to super PACs in the 2012 cycle — spending made possible thanks to the 2010 Citizens United U.S. Supreme Court decision, which allowed unions, corporations and wealthy individuals to make unlimited contributions to outside groups that expressly advocated for the election or defeat of federal candidates.

Lee Saunders, who was elected as AFSCME's president in June, is an Ohio native and the product of a union family — his father was a bus driver and his mother was a community organizer in Cleveland. Saunders is the first African-American to head AFSCME.  

Saunders stepped into the role just a few weeks after the failed AFSCME-backed effort to unseat Wisconsin’s Republican Gov. Scott Walker in a recall election. The contest attracted nearly $64 million in outside spending.

AFSCME spent heavily in the 2012 election, aiming more than $2.5 million in independent expenditures and voter turnout efforts against the presidential candidacy of Republican nominee Mitt Romney.

The union’s other top targets included Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev. — AFSCME spent nearly $2 million attacking Heller — and the Wisconsin Senate race, where the union spent $1.8 million to take down Republican candidate Tommy Thompson.

After sustaining the blow of Gov. Rick Snyder’s passage of Michigan’s right-to-work law in December, AFSCME and other big labor players plan to ramp up their efforts for the upcoming 2014 gubernatorial elections, Politico reported.

“You’ve got governors in this country, you’ve got ultra-conservatives who are trying to hurt us,” Saunders told C-SPAN in July. “They don’t want to see working families have a fair shake.”

Last updated: Dec. 20, 2012

*2011-2012 election cycle. Source: Center for Responsive Politics and Center for Public Integrity analysis of Federal Election Commission records. Totals include contributions from individuals, family members and corporations that are controlled by the individual super donor.

Ranking: 15

Total contributions to super PACs: $5.8 million*

• $2 million to Majority PAC (pro-Democratic)
• $1.5 million to Priorities USA Action (pro-Barack Obama)
• $1.1 million to Workers’ Voice (pro-Democratic), formerly known as AFL-CIO Workers’ Voices PAC     
• $700,000 to House Majority PAC (pro-Democratic)
• $250,000 to DGA Action (pro-Democratic)
• $100,000 to Ohio Families United (pro-Sherrod Brown)
• $100,000 to Women Vote! (pro-Democratic)

Notable federal hard money and 527 contributions:

• $10,000 to the Ohio Democratic Party

Notable state-level contributions:

• $5 million in support of or opposition to California ballot measures (2004-2012)
• $1.2 million in support of or opposition to Michigan ballot measures (2006-2012)
• $617,500 to the Ohio Democratic Party (2000-2012)
• $250,000 to the California Democratic Party (2006)

Total spent on federal lobbying (2007-2011): $5.3 million

Lobbying issues: Federal budget and appropriations, education, labor and workplace issues, health care, Medicare and Medicaid, retirement, taxes, trade, civil rights and civil liberties as well as issues pertaining to the District of Columbia

Biography:

The American Federation of Teachers is the nation’s second-largest teachers union next to the National Education Association. The AFT claims 1.5 million members, and it represents K-12 teachers and school employees in the nation’s largest urban school districts. In addition, the AFT counts teachers in post-secondary schools, public employees and health care workers among its membership.

The union mobilized support for President Barack Obama’s re-election bid with large voter registration, phone-banking, door knocking and get-out-the-vote efforts.

It also launched a bus tour through swing states in the final weeks of the campaign. At a stop in Toledo, Ohio, AFT President Randi Weingarten urged teachers to support Obama, saying GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney had a “binder of bad ideas” for public education.

The union sent donations to candidates in key U.S. Senate races, helping Democrats to victory in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Missouri and Massachusetts. It supported high-profile congressional races featuring women, including Democrat Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, who won a House seat, and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, who won a U.S. Senate seat.

In a statement soon after Obama’s re-election, Weingarten celebrated AFT’s ground game as contributing to a “victory for people power over money power.”

Last updated: Dec. 20, 2012

*2011-2012 election cycle. Source: Center for Responsive Politics and Center for Public Integrity analysis of Federal Election Commission records. Totals include contributions from individuals, family members and corporations that are controlled by the individual super donor.

Ranking: 9

Total contributions to super PACs: $10 million*

• $10 million to Independence USA PAC (pro-moderates and independents)
• $50,000 to Women VOTE! (pro-Democratic)

Notable federal hard money and 527 contributions:

• $25,000 to the Independence Party of Minnesota (2008)
• $12,100 to Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn. (2006)
• $10,000 to the National Leadership PAC (since 1999)
• $8,200 to Rep. John Sweeney, R-N.Y. (since 2004)
• $7,000 to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. (since 1998)

Notable state-level contributions (see here):

• $2.2 million to the New York State Republican Party (since 2002)
• $2.1 million to the Senate Republican Campaign Committee of New York (since 2000)
• $175,000 to the Republican Assembly Campaign Committee of New York (since 2000)
• $500,000 in support of California’s Proposition 29, which would have raised taxes on cigarettes and tobacco products to fund cancer research (2012)
• $250,000 in support of California’s Proposition 86, which would have raised taxes on cigarettes and tobacco products (2006)
• $250,000 in support of California’s Proposition 11, which created a state redistricting commission drawn from a voter pool (2008)
• $250,000 to FairDistrictFlorida.org, which supported two Florida ballot measures that reformed the redistricting process (2010)

Corporate ownership: Bloomberg Inc.

Subsidiaries: Bloomberg LP

Total spent on federal lobbying (2007-2011): $3.6 million by Bloomberg LP; $630,000 by Mayors Against Illegal Guns

Lobbying issues: Gun control, regulation of radio and television broadcasting, publishing, general finance, trade, telecommunications and antitrust, among others

Biography:

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg — a supporter of stronger regulation of firearms — has seen his profile rise dramatically in the wake of the shooting at a Connecticut elementary school.

Bloomberg, a billionaire publisher, is the ninth biggest super PAC donor this election cycle.

The Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-independent gave $10 million to super PACs, nearly all of it going to his Independence USA. Bloomberg is the sole donor to the super PAC. It favors candidates who support gun control, marriage equality for same-sex couples and education reform.

Bloomberg also contributed $3.1 million to Mayors Against Illegal Guns Action Fund, a “social welfare” nonprofit he co-founded and co-chairs with Boston Mayor Thomas Menino.

Bloomberg’s vast wealth has created a serious challenge to the politically powerful National Rifle Association as the nation revisits the debate over gun control. On Dec. 14, 20-year-old Adam Lanza gunned down 20 school children and six adults in Newtown, Conn., before killing himself.

Bloomberg, now in his third term, ran as a Republican in in 2001 but left the party in 2007. After getting the city to change a law that limited mayors to two consecutive four-year terms in office, he ran for re-election as an independent in 2009, spending $108 million of his own funds and securing a surprisingly narrow 4.6 percent margin of victory.

Bloomberg is a fiscal conservative and liberal on social issues. He supports marriage for same-sex couples and abortion rights.

“Being a fiscal conservative is not about slashing programs that help the poor, or improve health care, or ensure a social safety net,” he said in a speech at the 2007 British Conservative Party Conference, adding, “Fiscal conservatives have hearts too, but we also insist on using our brains.”

On Nov. 1, he endorsed President Barack Obama for re-election because he wanted someone who would “lead on climate change.”

As mayor, Bloomberg has focused on education, economic development and public health, making news by banning the sale of soft drinks larger than 16 ounces in restaurants and similar venues throughout the city.

Bloomberg, 70, was born and raised in the suburbs of Boston and graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1964 with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. He received his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School two years later. Bloomberg was hired by investment bank Salomon Brothers and eventually headed the firm’s information systems department, but was fired during a 1981 merger. He used his $10 million severance package to start Bloomberg LP, a financial news and data service.

Bloomberg LP is well-known for its “Bloomberg Terminal,” a software system typically paired with a distinctive monitor and keyboard that provides real-time financial information and stock quotes. The terminal also has an electronic trading platform. Bloomberg LP also operates several media outlets, including Bloomberg News, Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg TV.

The company has been immensely profitable, posting revenues near $8 billion for 2012, according to the Financial Times.

Michael Bloomberg is worth $22 billion, according to Forbes, and gives away hundreds of millions of dollars each year through Bloomberg Philanthropies. The charity has donated more than $2.4 billion to the arts, public health initiatives, government innovation, education and the environment, including a $50 billion donation to the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign in July.

Last updated: Dec. 20, 2012

*2011-2012 election cycle. Source: Center for Responsive Politics and Center for Public Integrity analysis of Federal Election Commission records. Totals include contributions from individuals, family members and corporations that are controlled by the individual super donor.

Ranking: 23        

Total contributions to super PACs: $4.2 million*

• $2.4 million to Priorities USA Action (pro-Barack Obama)
• $725,000 to Majority PAC (pro-Democratic)
• $500,000 to Workers’ Voice (pro-Democratic), formerly known as AFL-CIO Workers’ Voices PAC
• $436,000 to House Majority PAC (pro-Democratic)
• $75,000 to The American Worker (pro-Democratic)
• $26,000 to Stronger Together (pro-Democratic)
• $10,000 to Connecticut's Future PAC (pro-Chris Murphy)

Notable federal hard money and 527 contributions:

• $30,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee
• $20,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee
• More than $2.2 million to federal Democratic candidates during the 2012 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics

Notable state-level contributions:

• $100,000 to Jay Nixon, Democratic candidate for governor of Missouri
• $55,000 to John Gregg, Democratic candidate for governor of Indiana
• $50,000 to the Maryland Democratic Party
• $50,000 to the Ohio Democratic Party
• $50,000 to the Democratic Governors Association

Total spent on federal lobbying (2007-2011): N/A

Biography:

The United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipe Fitting Industry is without a doubt the most ponderously named super donor. The national labor organization represents 340,000 workers who build, install, weld and maintain various types of pipe systems.

The UA takes stands on issues specific to the pipe industry, including support for investments in “water infrastructure” and to “preserve our nation’s water quality and health.”

It is also an avowed supporter of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline project, which the union argues will provide “reliable, long-term access to Canadian oil and gas” as well as “create more than 13,000 good-paying jobs with benefits during construction.”

The support has placed the union on the opposite side of environmentalists, another key Democratic constituency.

The union has been a strong supporter of Democratic candidates in federal and state races, and devoted its resources on efforts to re-elect President Barack Obama. It gave the maximum contribution of $5,000 directly to numerous Democratic candidates for Congress, and it doled out larger sums in state governors races, including a $50,000 check to the primary spender in Democratic gubernatorial races, the Washington, D.C.-based Democratic Governors Association.

UA President William Hite criticized Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s choice of Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate. In a sharply worded August press release, Hite warned that Ryan “would happily shred the social fabric of our nation without a second thought,” and called the congressman the “architect” of plans to “abolish Medicare” and “gut health care for families in need.”

Hite called on Ryan to “explain to the American people why he wants to wage war on the middle class and the disadvantaged among us.”

When the Democratic National Convention convened in North Carolina, a state known for its aversion to unions, Hite dismissed the notion that organized labor was "not fully behind this convention or this party" and vowed his union’s continued support for Democratic leaders, which have failed to deliver on some of labor’s biggest agenda items since Obama first took office.

Last updated: Dec. 20, 2012.

*2011-2012 election cycle. Source: Center for Responsive Politics and Center for Public Integrity analysis of Federal Election Commission records. Totals include contributions from individuals, family members and corporations that are controlled by the individual super donor.

Ranking: 18

Total contributions to super PACs: $5.1 million**

• $1.1 million combined from son Jonathan Soros, son Alexander Soros and daughter Andrea Soros Colombel to Friends of Democracy (pro-campaign finance reform)
• $1 million to Priorities USA Action (pro-Barack Obama)
• $1 million to American Bridge 21st Century (pro-Democratic)
• $850,000 combined from Andrea, Jonathan and daughter-in-law Melissa Soros to Planned Parenthood Votes (pro-Democratic)
• $675,000 to House Majority PAC (pro-Democratic)
• $300,000, all from Alexander, to the Jewish Council for Education and Research (pro-Barack Obama)
• $100,000 to Majority PAC (pro-Democratic)

Notable federal hard money and 527 contributions:

• Between 2004 and 2008, George Soros contributed $32.2 million to a variety of Democratic-aligned 527 committees, including $23.7 million during the 2004 election cycle alone, when he ranked as the No. 1 donor to these political committees, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
• Jonathan Soros and his wife Jennifer gave more than $880,000 to federal candidates, PACs and political parties during the 2012 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
• Alexander Soros contributed at least $348,500 to federal candidates, PACs and political parties during the 2012 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Notable state-level contributions (see here):

• $1.4 million in support of California’s Proposition 5, the Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation Act (2008)
• $1 million in support of California’s Proposition 36, which modified the state’s “Three Strikes” law (2012)
• $1 million in support of California’s Proposition 19, which would have legalized marijuana in the state (2010)
• $406,000 to oppose Arizona’s Proposition 302, which gave judges more latitude in dealing with drug probation violations (2002)
• $400,000 in support of Massachusetts’ Ballet Question 2, which eliminated criminal penalties for marijuana possession (2008)

Corporate ownership: Soros Fund Management LLC

Subsidiaries: Soros Private Equity Fund

Total spent on federal lobbying by (2007-2011): $0. Soros Fund Management has not reported any federal lobbying since 2005.

Family: Five adult children: Robert Soros, Andrea Soros Colombel, Jonathan Soros, Alexander Soros and Gregory Soros

Biography:

Billionaire investor and philanthropist George Soros, a well-known and prolific donor to liberal causes, took it easy in 2012, giving, along with his family, a relatively modest $3.9 million to super PACs this election cycle. That’s down significantly from just a few years earlier when he bankrolled Democrats’ electoral efforts.

Soros was an ardent foe of former President George W. Bush, calling the Texan’s 2004 re-election bid “a matter of life and death.” He gave nearly $24 million to various so-called “527 committees,” the predecessors to super PACs, in an attempt to defeat Bush. Though Soros has continued to make substantial contributions to progressive outside spending groups, he has not given more than $5 million in an election cycle to these organizations since then, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Soros, who with a net worth of $19 billion is the 22nd richest man in the world, has been an active supporter of “open societies” — those that embrace democratic governance, freedom of expression and respect for individual rights — since 1979. He worked to foster free speech in communist Eastern Europe and continued to support the creation of open societies in former Soviet bloc countries after the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

Through the Open Society Foundations, Soros’ massive international network of charitable organizations, he has given more than $8 billion toward an array of causes, ranging from providing humanitarian aid to Burmese war victims to implementing freedom of information laws around the world.

His views are shaped in part by his experiences as a young Jewish teenager during the Nazi occupation of his native Hungary and the subsequent imposition of Stalinism in the country.

After emigrating to England in 1947 and earning a degree from the London School of Economics, Soros found work as a merchant banker in London. He moved to New York City in the mid-1950s to pursue a career in finance and started his signature hedge fund, the Quantum Fund, in 1969.

Soros is perhaps best known for his ability to predict — and profit from — market crashes. He has been dubbed “the man who broke the Bank of England,” profiting more than $1 billion when the British government devalued the pound sterling in 1992.

Soros also profited during the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s by short selling Thai and Malaysian currencies. He has been accused of causing the crisis, but maintains that was not the case.

His hedge fund company began managing Soros family assets exclusively in July of 2011. The company had approximately $25 billion in assets under management prior to the transition, and returned $1 billion to investors following the announcement.

Soros’ son Alexander, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in history at the University of California, Berkeley, has started his own philanthropic organization. The Alex Soros Foundation supports social justice and human rights.

Soros’ son Jonathan launched his own super PAC called “Friends of Democracy” in April. The group markets itself as an anti-super PAC super PAC, supporting candidates who back campaign finance reform. Jonathan and his siblings accounted for the bulk of the money the organization raised.

“We openly acknowledge the irony of being a super PAC trying to address money in politics,” Jonathan Soros told the Washington Post in July. “But our goal is to eventually decrease the influence of this kind of group.”

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Friends of Democracy spent roughly $2 million against 11 Republican candidates in the 2012 election.

Soros has been married and divorced twice. He is currently engaged to Tamiko Bolton, who is 42 years his junior.

Last updated: Dec. 20, 2012

*George Soros is the chairman of the Open Society Foundation, which provides funding for the Center for Public Integrity. For a list of the Center's donors, visit this page on our website.

**2011-2012 election cycle. Source: Center for Responsive Politics and Center for Public Integrity analysis of Federal Election Commission records. Totals include contributions from individuals, family members and corporations that are controlled by the individual super donor.

After Vermont hospitals started buying up the medical practices of local physicians, state Sen. Kevin Mullin of Rutland, began hearing complaints that prices some patients were paying for routine medical care had soared.

One family accustomed to paying about $120 in out-of-pocket costs for doctor visits and other medical services was outraged when they ended up forking over more than $1,000 for similar visits, Mullin said, mostly for seeing doctors whose practices had been bought out by a local hospital.

 “The only thing that was different was the office was [now] hospital-owned,” said Mullin, a Republican. “All of a sudden everything was charged differently.”

The root of these increases are controversial charges known as “facility fees,” and they are routinely tacked on to patients’ bills not just for services actually provided in hospitals, but also by outpatient care centers and doctors’ offices simply because they’ve been purchased by hospital-based health care systems. Hospitals argue they can’t afford to keep the doors open without facility fees.

Hospitals have billed them at least since 2000 when Medicare set billing standards for doctors employed by hospitals, and private insurers went along. Since then, the fees have grown increasingly common, costly and controversial. Critics argue that the billing practice needlessly adds billions of dollars to the nation’s ballooning health care costs and needs to be revamped. Some private insurers have protested the fees and in some cases even refused to pay them, which can add to the patient’s share of the bill. But getting rid of the charges — or even requiring medical offices to post facility fees — has proved daunting, reformers say.

Mullin introduced legislation earlier this year to ban the practice in his state, only to see the bill “watered down” to simply require that the fees be disclosed in advance. The state Senate approved the amended bill, but it failed to pass in the House, even though the state hospital association supported it.

Now,  as budget cutters on Capitol Hill drill into Medicare payment policies in hopes of finding new veins of cost savings, the fairness of these fees is facing new scrutiny — including from the federal commission that advises Congress on Medicare spending policy. Hospitals are fighting back and have enlisted support from the Service Employees International Union, which represents more than one million nurses, doctors and other health care workers.

The stakes are high indeed. A decision by Medicare to quit allowing the fees would almost certainly lead private insurers to do the same across the country and all but put an end to them.

“This is low hanging fruit [for cutting costs],” said Dr. Kevin Kavanagh, a retired physician who heads HealthWatch USA, a patient advocacy group based in Kentucky.

Tom Nickels, the American Hospital Association’s vice president for federal relations in Washington, strongly defends the fees. But he agrees that the issue “is clearly in play” as lawmakers scramble to slash health care costs in coming months.

Fees for more than hospital care

Facility fees are a routine part of any hospital bill. But patients can also be hit with facility fees when they seek care from:

·       Private physicians who have sold their medical practices to a hospital and stayed on as employees. More than half the nation’s doctors now work on salary. When that happens, patients may suddenly get a bill from the doctor and a separate one from the hospital that owns the office. Some prestigious health systems, such as the Cleveland Clinic, also put their doctors on salary and charge a facility fee for office visits.

·       Outpatient medical centers that are part of a hospital-owned network, including centers treating serious diseases such as cancer or operating specialized clinics for the elderly.

·       Urgent care centers set up by hospitals largely to treat relatively minor ailments. Thousands of these centers exist nationwide, about one third believed to be hospital-owned. Some don’t tell patients in advance about facility fees.

·       Outpatient surgery centers where doctors perform routine operations. The centers can charge facility fees that run into the thousands of dollars. As deductibles rise on some insurance policies, patients may not realize they can get stuck with paying larger hunks of these bills than in the past.

The fees date back to April 2000, when Medicare clarified its policy for billing by health groups that hired physicians. At the time, CMS officials acknowledged that critics wanted the agency to forbid hospitals from buying up medical practices for the purpose of converting them to hospital “facilities” that could tender higher fees for the same services.

In a response published at the time in the Federal Register, CMS said it understood the concerns, but lacked the authority to “prohibit this practice.”

The issue popped up last year when the House passed legislation that extended the payroll tax holiday and unemployment compensation benefits. Tucked into the “Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act” was a provision to cut about $6.8 billion in Medicare costs by targeting doctor services in hospital-owned offices.

The hospital industry fought back hard — and ultimately successfully. The cuts never passed the Senate and were not in the final conference committee bill signed by President Obama in February.

Making the case

The health care industry argues that prices must be based at least in part on where a medical service is rendered. That means hospitals, which have high overhead and substantial costs for equipment, technology and personnel, expect to collect more money for the same service than at a doctor’s office. Similarly, outpatient centers impose fees to cover the cost of supplies, equipment and space and in most states aren’t obligated to tell patients about the fees in advance so they can shop around.

The American Hospital Association argues that phasing out the payments “threatens patient access to care.” The group said that hospitals tend to treat “sicker, more complex patients” and are better equipped than doctors’ offices and should be paid more. Cutting the fees would impact low-income and chronically ill people who depend on networks of hospital-based outpatient clinics, the group said.

Hospitals add that charging facility fees for medical care in doctors’ offices or care centers they own helps spread the cost of keeping expensive units, such as emergency rooms, open round the clock, and helps them absorb losses from patients who can’t pay their bills.

Some patients clearly disagree. Like Linda Romaniello, of Davie, Fla.  After her 8-year-old daughter was nipped by a dog, she took her to a local urgent care center and left with a bill for more than $500. The child was treated with antibiotic gel and a simple bandage during her 15-minute visit, according to the South Florida Sun Sentinel, which reported on the incident last year.

Because the center was owned by Baptist Health South Florida, the hospital-based system  slapped a $275 facility fee on top of the $233 doctor’s bill. The woman’s insurance refused to pay half the fee and Romaniello argued she would have gone elsewhere had she known about the extra fees beforehand. Florida has since passed a law requiring urgent care centers to post prices and all its clinics do so, a Baptist spokesperson said.

Dr. Marc Salzberg, president of the Urgent Care Association of America, said these fees “should be transparent to the consumer” and that people should know about them “before they get care.” Salzberg says his group believes there are between 6,000 and 9,000 of these centers nationwide, 30 percent to 40 percent of them hospital-owned.

Connie Peterson, 67, a retired graphics designer who lives in Iowa City, Iowa, also experienced the sting of facility fees. She was aghast after receiving a bill for nearly $26,000 in facility fees from an outpatient surgery center where she spent less than an hour.

“I was livid when I received the bill,” said Peterson. She spent months trying to get an explanation that made sense to her. “All I wanted was an itemized bill to let me know exactly what I’m paying for. I never got that,” she said.

Peterson had three procedures to remove nasal polyps during her 45-minute stay at the Iowa City Ambulatory Surgical Center in April. The center billed more than $8,000 in facility fees for each one, bringing the total to $25,872. She had to pay $1,086 of that.

In a letter responding to her complaint, the center said its rates were in accordance with national standards. Unlike hospitals, these centers don’t itemize charges, but bill all inclusive rates which include facility fees.

As more hospital systems set up specialty medical practices, there’s been some movement on requiring more disclosure, but it’s still not clear how many of these hospitals tell patients up front that they could be paying higher rates as a result.

“Hospitals are not really interested in being candid about what they are doing. They tell you that you will get two bills instead of one,” said John W. Phillips, a Seattle lawyer who has filed class action lawsuits seeking to make hospitals disclose the fees — and in ways people can easily understand. In one case he filed, a Seattle hospital agreed to refund the fees and post a price schedule in future.

Some hospitals do so already.  New patients at the Senior Health Clinic at North Hills Hospital in North Richland, Texas, receive a letter advising that as an “outpatient department” of the hospital the center will add a facility fee, which “covers the cost of the clinic staff, supplies, equipment and space.” Similarly, Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Florida posts a notice on its website that advises those who schedule clinic visits that they will be charged a fee.

Responding to criticism, hospitals are supporting a bill in Congress that would require more disclosure so that patients can compare prices.

The Health Care Price Transparency Promotion Act of 2012 (HR 5800) introduced in May by U.S. Reps. Michael C. Burgess, R-Texas, and Texas Democrat Gene Green, directs states to pass laws requiring that hospitals notify patients in advance of out-of-pocket costs. It also orders up a study within 18 months to recommend ways in which to make information available to patients in an easy- to-understand format.

More than 30 states already require some degree of disclosure, though critics complain that what patients see often is difficult to compare or simply too dense for many people to decipher.

 “Consumers ought to be told what they will be required to pay,” said Nickels, the hospital association’s lobbyist.

The battle is joined

Meantime, though, the broader fight over facility fees continues, albeit a bit under the radar. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, or MedPAC, which advises Congress, stirred up the debate in January when it recommended that the health plan for seniors pay for visits with doctors at the same rate, no matter where they occurred, and regardless  of whether the doctor practices independently or is employed by a hospital.

The panel noted that hospitals buying up medical practices in recent years have been tacking on facility fees that increase the patient’s bill even when the doctor is working from the very same office. In March, the commission recommended standardizing payments over three years, sparking an outcry from the hospital industry.

MedPAC said that eliminating facility fees that Medicare pays for doctor services would reduce Medicare spending from between $1 billion and $5 billion over five years. The current system fails to create “clear benefits for patients,” the commission said, adding: “Medicare should be discouraging, not encouraging, expenditures by health care providers that do not benefit patients.” 

The current system also can leave elderly patients liable for a heftier chunk of the bill. The commission noted that in 2011 Medicare paid doctors $68.97 for a 15-minute office visit, of which the patient was responsible for a co-payment of $13.79. For that same service in a hospital-owned medical practice, Medicare paid a total of $124.40. In that case, the patient co-payment was $24.88.

 “I don’t see a policy justification for why a physician’s time is worth more as a hospital employee,” said Jeff Goldsmith, a Virginia health care consultant. Goldsmith said Medicare is paying a “subsidy” that is “encouraging hospitals to buy up practices and dramatically increase the cost of their services.”

Dr. Robert Berenson, a former MedPAC vice-chairman, said the proposed changes would lead to “major league savings” and could prove tempting if Congress “gets serious about reducing Medicare spending.” But Berenson conceded that hospitals opposing the changes are “pretty damn powerful.”

A September letter sent to members of Congress by five hospital groups said the changes proposed by MedPAC would reduce payments to hospitals by 71 percent for ten common outpatient visits. “To pay a hospital — with our emergency department, surgical, nursing, emergency transportation and myriad other costs — the same as a physician office does not make sense,” the letter stated.

Those five hospital groups have plenty of muscle on Capitol Hill. The five organizations together spent at least $22 million in political contributions and lobbying costs this year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Nickels, the hospital association lobbyist, said Congress is looking for ways to finance the so-called “doctor fix,” an annual ritual passed to prevent Medicare payments to physicians from plummeting by 27 per cent, as required by a 1997 law. Hospitals are worried because adopting MedPAC’s recommendations could bring in enough cash to partly pay for the ‘fix.’

To complicate matters further, nearly two dozen prestigious health systems, such as the Cleveland Clinic, which employs physicians and charges facility fees for services rendered in their offices, also are fighting to maintain the status quo. These systems often have been credited with offering higher quality care and for keeping costs in check. To penalize them would be a “giant step backward in [health] delivery system reform,” Dr. J. James Rohack, co-chair of the 19-member Integrated Health Care Coalition, wrote in a July letter to the House Ways and Means Committee.

The health groups also have some powerful allies.  In a Dec. 4 full-page ad in The Washington Post, the service employees union argued that hospital-based clinics “have provided the primary — and sometimes only — access to physicians for the nation’s underserved rural and urban communities.” Cutting back the fees “will force these clinics to close,” the ad states.

But MedPAC hasn’t shown any signs of giving up.   Last month, the commission suggested that Medicare also pay a single rate for a variety of medical procedures, regardless of the site. The commission staff noted that Medicare pays 90 percent more for a laser eye procedure done in a hospital outpatient department than in a doctor’s office because of added facility fees. The commission is set to vote on a final recommendation in January, though it’s unclear whether Congress would support such a change.

Hospitals have argued that such cuts would impair their ability to keep staff on hand for emergency rooms and “disaster readiness.” In a letter sent to the Medicare advisory panel in late October, Rick Pollack, executive vice president of the hospital association, cited the “threat of terrorist attacks, recent mass shootings, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the devastating tornados over the past year.”

But adopting what MedPAC calls a “site-neutral” payment policy would save Medicare $900 million over the course of a year and seniors would save $250 million more in out of pocket costs, according to the commission.

The controversy is erupting as the hospital industry faces tighter scrutiny over billing matters. In September, the Center for Public Integrity series Cracking the Codes documented how hospital emergency rooms have dramatically increased Medicare billings for facility fees and doctor services, adding more than $1 billion in costs to taxpayers over the past decade. Top government officials, including Attorney General Eric Holder, have since threatened possible criminal prosecution for doctors and hospitals that bill for more complex and costly services than they provided.

Insurers are getting more combative, too. Dolores Mitchell, who heads the state of Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission, said she is encouraging health plans and patients to resist paying higher prices for the same services.

“If the nature of the visit is identical, it shouldn’t cost more money,” said Mitchell, who oversees health plans that cover more than 400,000 government employees and their families. “It shouldn’t make any difference.”

Mitchell said that the fees may be justified when patients are treated in a room that requires a sterile atmosphere or other high-tech hospital equipment. “But where it’s simply an office visit, to charge a facility fee is inappropriate,” she said. But she added: “Once you get a revenue stream, it’s very hard to turn off the spigot.” 

Whether Congress will cut off these payments is not yet clear.  Former MedPac vice-chairman Berenson said that any policy change would need to account for losses hospitals incur to keep essential services open. That might happen, he said, if Congress considers the matter as part of a deal on taxes and entitlement programs such as Medicare.

“If not part of ‘entitlement reform,’ I think prospects for congressional adoption are less,” Berenson said. 

One of the most ill-advised promises President Obama made during the health care reform debate was this: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.”

He should have known better. First, insurance companies and employers are far more in control of determining whether or not you can keep your health plan than the government. That was true before ObamaCare was passed, and it’s true today.

Second, ObamaCare will indeed mean that some health plans will no longer be available a year from now. That’s a good thing, despite what you’ll be hearing from companies that make huge profits selling inadequate coverage.

A few insurers have for years used slick brochures and sales pitches to persuade people to buy policies that will not come close to shielding them from financial ruin if they get sick or injured.  Many people who have bought these policies undoubtedly believe they have a health plan worth keeping, especially since premiums for inadequate coverage are usually lower than premiums for real insurance. You can be certain that many of those folks will complain loudly when junk health insurance is banned in 2014 and, in so doing, become unwitting soldiers in the insurance industry’s ongoing battle to gut the consumer protections in ObamaCare.

Back to that first point for a moment. I remember shaking my head when I first heard the President assure me back in 2009 that I could keep my plan if I liked it. To deliver on that promise, the law would have to require employers and insurers to keep offering plans they want to get rid of, and that was never going to happen. A few years before I left my job in the insurance industry I was forced out of a plan I liked—a PPO—because my employer decided to stop offering PPOs to its workers and to move all of us into a high-deductible plan.

Now back to junk insurance. Starting in 2014, health insurance plans must offer a minimal level of coverage, and they cannot have sky-high deductibles and caps on covered benefits.  Big insurance companies like Aetna and Cigna are not at all happy about that because they make millions selling policies with very limited benefits that cover nothing after a paltry annual cap is reached.

To make us all want to petition Congress to change ObamaCare to allow them to keep selling these policies, insurance company executives have come up with a term to scare the bejesus out of us if they don’t get their way: premium shock.

At a meeting with Wall Street financial analysts a few days ago, Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini used that term in his warning that in some cases, premium hikes could soon be “as high as 100 percent.”

“Premium rate shock for 2014, absent subsidies and everything else, is going to be in the neighborhood of 20 to 50 percent,” Bertolini said. “And we’re going to see some markets…go as high as 100 percent.”

Note Bertolini excluded subsidies from his math. If he hadn’t his arithmetic wouldn’t have had the same impact.  Most people who have bought limited benefit plans are low-income individuals and families who currently can’t afford anything else. Under ObamaCare, starting in 2014 people up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level will be eligible for subsidies from the government to help them buy decent coverage.

Some background: In 2005, Aetna paid $250 million for Strategic Resources Co., a company that specializes in limited benefit plans. I found one such Aetna plan online that pays no more than $10,000 a year for inpatient hospital care and doesn’t cover pre-existing conditions during the first year of the policy. Under ObamaCare, not only will annual caps be unlawful, but insurers will also no longer be able to refuse to cover preexisting conditions.

Not to be outdone, Cigna in 2006 paid $175 million to buy Star HRG to compete with Aetna in the limited-benefits marketplace.  Aetna and Cigna and the other companies that sell limited benefit plans want to protect those investments. That’s why they want us to worry about premium shock.

They’re also using that term—and its cousin, rate shock—to get us to go to bat for them to get Congress to allow them to continue charging their older customers five times or more than what they charge their younger policyholders.  In 2014 they won’t be able to charge older folks more than three times as much as younger people.

As part of their “premium shock” campaign, insurance executives and their allies will remind us of Obama’s 2009 promise, and they’ll blame any rate increases a year from now on ObamaCare. Some increases are inevitable, but in return we’ll be spared from paying good money for coverage that is anything but good.

The multinational NATO force in Afghanistan has declared that it spent more than $200 million to buy fuel for the Afghan Army in 2010 and 2011, but cannot locate any documents to substantiate the expense or show precisely where the money went, according to a special report by a government watchdog on Dec. 20.

As a result, the U.S. government is unable to “account for $201 million” worth of fuel purchases, said Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) John Sopko, in a letter alerting two members of Congress to the missing documentation.

The letter is a follow-up to a warning by Sopko in September that coalition force personnel in Afghanistan had improperly shredded fuel purchase records that covered a five-year period, blocking the ability of auditors to assess how much fuel was actually used by the Afghani army and how much might have been lost or stolen.

Since then, many of the relevant records were found, but a deeper investigation by Sopko’s team failed to find those it is complaining about now.

In his report to the chairman and ranking minority member of the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee on national security and foreign operations, Sopko said he had found “no evidence that the document shredding was related to criminal activity.” But he noted that the shredding began within days after the U.S. military’s Central Command specifically ordered managers “not to destroy or dispose of financial records.”

Sopko said his staff interviewed more than a dozen current and former contracting officials and found two that admitted to doing the shredding with the aim of enhancing “efficiency [and] saving physical storage space.” They claimed it was authorized, and said they scanned the documents into a computer first, but said they could not recall where the scans were stored.

One of the supervisors they named did not recall approving it, and the other said the documents were supposed to be scanned “but did not recall what was done with the original documents.” No one could find them, Sopko’s letter said.

Cdr. William H. Speaks, a Defense Department spokesman, said in an e-mail Friday that “NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan/Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan (CSTC-A) takes this matter very seriously, and they continue to work with the SIGAR investigators on the issue.” He said the Pentagon could not comment further because SIGAR has not completed its work.

SIGAR spokesman Philip J. Lavelle said however that while SIGAR final report on the issue will be published in January, “our investigation into the shredding is closed.” He said it is now up to others to act on the findings.

The episode is hardly the only snafu involving U.S. aid to the country’s reconstruction. In a separate report this month, Sopko’s office disclosed that $12.8 million worth of equipment purchased by the military to upgrade the Afghanistan electrical grid has been sitting in storage for years, partly because of confusion over which U.S. agency is responsible for its installation.

The military responded that it has “developed a clear plan for the installation of the equipment.”

Even as Los Angeles authorities continue efforts to reform school-discipline standards, fresh data show that police from the city’s biggest school district are continuing to ticket thousands of young students, especially minorities, at disproportionate rates that critics charge are putting them on a track for dropping out.

Citation rates for this year are little changed from 2011 data. Disclosure of the 2011 data this past spring led to federal civil-rights scrutiny and promises that policies at the Los Angeles Unified School District would be reviewed, and likely changed.

In 2011, children 14 or younger in the school district, the area’s biggest, were issued 43 percent of the nearly 10,200 tickets school police handed out to students for fighting, daytime-curfew violations and other minor infractions — indiscretions that community groups and judges have maintained might better be handled by school officials or referred directly to community-based counseling.

But during the first six months of 2012, even as local juvenile judges’ skepticism about ticketing grew, the share of younger students issued citations increased — to about 48 percent of approximately 4,000 tickets issued, according to a review of the data by the Center for Public Integrity.

Critics concede there has been some progress. Data from September and October reveal district school police officers issued fewer daytime curfew tickets than a year before — the result of new rules adopted last February that stopped police “sweeps” ticketing kids as they arrived to school, even a few minutes late. But records also show that during these two months, school police still wrote up more than 1,000 citations to students mostly for other infractions, including disturbing-the-peace allegations and suspected marijuana smoking.

Since last school year, community and parent representatives have met occasionally with school police officials to discuss their concerns about police involvement in discipline matters. Some school administrators also say they’d like to see clarification as to when an incident merits police officers citing — or arresting — students. L.A. Unified’s school police force is the nation’s biggest such agency, with about 350 sworn officers and 125 school safety officers.

“I think you have to save [police action] for really egregious things, like assault,” said Jorge Cortez, the principal at Judith Baca Arts Academy, a Los Angeles Unified elementary school.

Cortez told the Center that a mom’s complaint last April led to school police issuing tickets to two African-American first-graders who had gotten into a pushing match at his school. The mother of one child called 911, Cortez said.

Sheriff’s deputies declined to get involved, Cortez said. School police officers responded and issued “disturbing the peace” tickets for “mutual fighting” to the six- and seven-year-old boys. The citations were referred to the Los Angeles County Probation Department.

Knowledge of right and wrong?

L.A. Unified School Police Chief Steven Zipperman called citations of children as young as six and seven “an anomaly.”

“When we take a look at citing any student or arresting anybody for a crime,” the chief said, “it is all going to be based on whether they have the knowledge of whether what they were doing is right or wrong.”

Records show that in September and October, tickets were issued to children as young as 10 years old. They also show that that 13-year-olds were cited more often than 14-year-olds, or 17-year-olds. Zipperman explained that kids in the middle-school age group are “probably one of our largest populations [involved]  in a fighting-type activity.”

The chief said he and district officials are continuing to discuss standards for when officers should refer cases back to administrators, rather than issuing tickets —especially for incidents like fighting. Zipperman said he still believes, however, that school police officers need to have the discretion to make decisions on a “case-by-case basis.”

Additional findings from September-October school-police data show:

• A 10-year-old African-American child was ticketed in September for trespassing at the Menlo Park Elementary School.
• At the Bret Harte Preparatory Middle School, seven African-American students between 11 and 13 were given disturbing-the-peace citations by police for fighting, also in September.
• Black students were ticketed at twice the rate of their percentage of  school population. 

District officials did not respond to inquiries about these and other specific incidents, but issued a statement that the school police force “has not, and will not, engage in any form of biased or discriminatory enforcement activities.”

The statement says the district “will continue to work with our internal and external stakeholders to identify and evaluate non-penal alternatives to various minor violations.”

But concerns remain. Los Angeles Delinquency Court Judge Donna Quigley Groman, in an interview, noted that “if the approach was the same now when we went to school, a lot of us wouldn’t be where we are now.”  

Groman credits Zipperman with a positive response to concerns about the role of school police, who are obviously critical to student and staff safety. Both the judge and the chief have joined a reform “partnership” that first met in September in the wake of protests over police intervention in discipline matters and Center and Southern California Public Radio stories analyzing previously undisclosed police citation records.

The School-based Arrest Reform Partnership is attempting to negotiate a protocol for when it’s appropriate for police to arrest students in situations that don’t necessarily require it. The talks include representatives of L.A. Unified and its school police force; the city of Los Angeles’ police department; and the L.A. County’s sheriff’s department, probation department, district attorney’s office, public defender’s office and parents and civil rights groups.

Three meetings have taken place and another is planned for January. The first goal is to reach consensus on which offenses might be candidates for an alternative series of responses before resorting to arrest. Such steps could include written warnings and referrals to counseling, said Ruth Cusick, an attorney with  Public Counsel, a pro bono law firm in Los Angeles.

Cusick said the partnership would also like to bring in a representative of United Teachers of Los Angeles, a union representing district teachers. A union representative said the group hasn’t heard from Public Counsel yet.

The meetings come on the heels of other changes that occurred last year, when the L.A. unified district struck an agreement with the civil rights division of the U.S. Department of Education to reduce suspensions of black students, especially.

The district is pressing all its schools to start practicing “positive behavioral” support methods that emphasize frequent praise to help engage students in school. Some schools have started peer “courts” in school to sort out disputes, as well as referrals to community-based counseling.

“Citations, we need them in there, but we also need to educate our kids as well,” said Earl Perkins, L.A. Unified’s assistant superintendent of school operations.

Positive change, but complaints remain

The efforts to set new standards for police action are a function of both a desire for clarity and new fiscal realities.

This summer, budget cuts led to the closure of low-level juvenile courts in Los Angeles County, which had adjudicated cases involving ticketed students. Children were obliged, ironically, to miss school to go to court with parents so they could answer to truancy or other offenses that carried fines. If they hid a ticket from parents and skipped going to court — as many did — the result was a misdemeanor record.

With those courts now closed, all initial citations for daytime curfew violations are now referred back to schools, or to one of a new series of L.A. community centers with after-school counseling options.

All other types of tickets are going to probation officials, who decide on a course of action. Hopefully, probation officials say, most of the kids currently referred to them will resolve their problems by successfully completing mandated counseling services, sometimes with their families.

Children who are arrested or whose offenses are judged more serious still face higher-level delinquency court.

Groman said she’s been troubled to see kids as young as 11 referred to her court when they’re charged with criminal offenses at school.

Recalling her own youth, Groman related a story of scaring a teacher by running around a classroom with a scissors. “I didn’t know how to express myself any better,” said Groman. “But would I be where I am today if the school had expelled me for being in possession of a weapon? I highly doubt it.”

Similar concerns were aired nationally Dec. 12 at the first congressional hearing on the “school to prison pipeline,” and the impact of zero-tolerance discipline policies. It was held before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights.

Schools have increasingly become “a gateway” to the criminal-justice system, said Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat who presided over the hearing.

Federal justice and education officials testified that research clearly shows that placing students in the criminal-justice system for relatively minor offenses only increases their risk of dropping out and going on to more trouble.

Within the Los Angeles district, some schools are struggling with dropout rates higher than 50 percent.

Age limit needed, some argue

Some community activists would like to see an age limit on kids who could be issued police citations, or a civilian review board to monitor school police.

Hostile contact with school police can have a very profound impact on kids, said Manuel Criollo, an organizer with the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles, which led the charge to rein in daytime-curfew sweeps around inner-city Los Angeles schools.

Many students are struggling in school or at home, Criollo said. Even those who are doing well, he said, get discouraged if police treat them as potential troublemakers.

The Strategy Center helped file complaints with Zipperman on behalf of two boys who were stopped by officers near their school, minutes late, and were searched, handcuffed and allegedly intimidated inside a squad car before officers took them into school and wrote them curfew tickets. The complaints, reported by the Center earlier this year, are still under review, Strategy Center lawyer Zoe Rawson and police said.

The national picture

U.S. schools have only recently been required to disclose ticket and arrest numbers to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which is trying to measure the extent of student referrals to police and courts.

L.A. Unified, along with other districts, failed to submit its data last year. District officials explained that calculating referrals is daunting because multiple police agencies operate in the L.A. district.

But records reviewed by the Center suggest that L.A. Unified’s school force, which by far has the most contact with students, tickets them at higher rates than police assigned to New York City’s schools. With about 1 million students, New York’s system is the only U.S. school district bigger than L.A. Unified, which has fewer than 700,000 students.

The American Civil Liberties Union — which is suing New York police for alleged excessive force in schools — regularly obtains and reviews quarterly figures for that district’s school-based citations and arrests.

During the 2011-2012 academic year, the ACLU recently said, New York police issued 1,666 citations to students. By comparison, L.A. Unified school police issued more than 1,000 tickets in September and October of this year alone.

New York police made 882 arrests in schools during the 2011-2012 academic year. L.A. school police made 4,333 arrests over the course of three calendar years, from 2009 through 2011, according to data that the Center for Public Integrity reviewed.

More than 1,960, or 45 percent, of the Los Angeles arrests were of students 14 or younger.

The single biggest type of offense for which L.A. students were arrested was battery, including battery on school staff and police officers, said Cusick of Public Counsel. She said it is not uncommon for students to become emotional and struggle if they are grabbed during an encounter with police. First-time battery incidents, with no serious injury involved, Cusick said, are among the offenses that authorities could consider putting on a list for referral to prompt professional counseling rather than to court.  

For Groman, the case of an 11-year-old accused of battery on a teacher sums up flaws in the current court-referral system.

“I don’t condone any kind of physical violence against a teacher,” she said. “However, to send an 11-year-old boy to juvenile court, where he’s sitting in the waiting room with many more sophisticated youth, gang-related youth, it’s just not the place for an 11-year-old.”

Like many kids, Groman added, the 11-year-old’s day in court did not take place until 60 days after the incident — too late for a child to effectively make a connection to what he or she did two months ago.

“This young boy needed some therapy,” Groman said. “The family needed some counseling. Yet none of that was done because the case, instead of being handled at the school level, was referred to the juvenile-justice system, which does not move very fast at all.”

Alternative ideas

In September, a team of justice authorities from Clayton County, Ga., traveled to Los Angeles to talk to Groman and others about a protocol they follow for referring students to court. Clayton County has emerged as a model for reformers.

Until firm standards were set, Clayton County Chief Juvenile Court Judge Steven Teske said, more than 90 percent of referrals to his court came from schools.

Lt. Francisco Romero, former Clayton County school resource officer, accompanied Teske to L.A. Romero told the Center that he supported instituting a protocol after realizing that he had arrested more students  than any other officer in his county during one period of time.

“I never had any positive engagement with the kids. All they saw me as was an arresting machine,” Romero said. Some school staff resisted a formal protocol at first. But ultimately, Romero said, schools accepted it and Romero found he could focus on serious crimes. Kids grew to trust him. Teske testified at the recent congressional hearing that the protocol helped drive up graduation rates and reduce felonies.

Zipperman said that in Los Angeles, the citations his officers write don’t always lead to “punitive” action against a student. For many, he said, it’s a path to getting the counseling they need.

Hellen Carter, juvenile field services chief of the Los Angeles County Probation Department, praised Zipperman as a “tremendous problem solver.” But she said it still takes weeks to get kids processed and into counseling, which isn’t ideal. Schools could accomplish a lot more, she said, with more “teen courts” and mediation on campus. And school staff could benefit, she said, from training to distinguish between what is truly a serious incident and what is not.  

“We know that kids are going to do some dumb things,” Carter said. “And we want to give them the opportunity to make amends for what they’ve done, learn from what they’ve done, but also not put them in a position where it can literally destroy their future.”

Center for Public Integrity data editor David Donald contributed to this report.

The Sri Lankan government is vowing to impose tighter controls on pesticides and fertilizers amid growing concern the chemicals are helping fuel a mysterious epidemic of chronic kidney disease devastating its north central region.

In September, in Mystery in the Fields, the Center for Public Integrity explored how a rare form of chronic kidney disease is killing agricultural workers in Sri Lanka, India and Central America. Scientists in each region are struggling to identify the cause of these parallel epidemics, which have led to tens of thousands of deaths worldwide and are suspected to be linked to a toxic exposure.

In a November 2012 speech laying out a national budget proposal, Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa pledged to take action to crack down on contaminated agrochemicals.

“There is a theory that pesticides and chemical fertilizer contribute to increase non-communicable diseases,” Rajapaksa said, referring in oblique terms to the politically controversial kidney epidemic. “Therefore, regulations will be formulated to require suppliers and distributors of all agrochemicals to comply with quality standards.”

A committee of government ministers is meeting with scientific experts and interest groups and will submit a report to the cabinet with recommendations for the regulations, said Sri Lanka’s Registrar of Pesticides, Dr. Anura Wijesekera. 

Wijesekara, whose office oversees imports and permitting of agrochemicals, said Sri Lanka had already taken a significant step earlier this year: establishing limits of detection for nine toxins including cadmium and arsenic. Pesticides and fertilizers containing more than the permitted amounts of these chemicals are prohibited from distribution.

The country has not always moved swiftly to restrict pesticides.

Following years of official research, the Sri Lankan health ministry and World Health Organization declared in June that low level exposures to the heavy metals cadmium and arsenic were “causative factors” for the ailment – which they have named CKDu, chronic kidney disease of unknown etiology. Despite prior warnings from the WHO to reduce farmers’ exposure to agrochemicals, the Sri Lankan government in 2011 lifted a temporary ban on pesticides it had found to be contaminated with small amounts of arsenic, the Center reported.

Wijesekara said he lifted the ban because the levels of arsenic contained in the pesticides were too low to pose a threat.

Now, Wijesekara said his office is acting to curb marketing by fertilizer and pesticide producers, which he said encouraged farmers to use excessive amounts of agrochemicals. “They had been trying to advertise pesticides as fast-moving consumer goods,” Wijesekara said of the pesticide industry.

Yet even as it tightens controls, the Sri Lankan government has not released the scientific reports it says provide the basis for its policies.

In June, when the WHO and Sri Lanka’s health ministry cited cadmium and arsenic exposure as a possible cause for CKDu, they did not publicly release their supporting evidence. WHO officials said a technical report detailing the lab results  would be released in late September. That deadline shifted to late October, and was pushed back again as the report was submitted to the Sri Lankan health ministry for review. On December 20, Sri Lanka’s Director General of Health Services, Dr. Palitha Mahipala, told a CPI reporter he would share the technical report, but the WHO then indicated it would not be ready until mid-January.

Some experts question whether the government truly has evidence to back up its assertions. Wijesekara said he attended closed-door sessions earlier this year in which the WHO presented its scientific findings to government officials and leading researchers. He said  the WHO indicated the culprit was cadmium rather than arsenic, but did not share detailed evidence linking the exposure to agrochemicals. “I don’t have any scientific evidence to accept that they  cause CKDu,” Wijesekara said.

Protections for kidney recipients

As the official study remains sealed, Sri Lanka is acting to improve treatment for the flood of CKDu patients in its hard-hit northern farmlands. This fall, the government hospital in the city of Anuradhapura, the capital of Sri Lanka’s North Central Province, performed its first kidney transplants, which offer the only chance at long-term survival for patients with advanced cases of the disease.

Among the seven patients receiving transplants in Anuradhapura was 21-year-old Sampath Kumarasinghe – an ailing rice farmer the Center profiled in September. Sampath had his transplant on Sept. 25 and is recovering successfully, said Dr. Rajeewa Dassanayake, the head of the nephrology unit at the Anuradhapura hospital.

Yet his path to a new kidney came after a twist involving a potential donor.

In September, the Center reported that Sampath was expecting a kidney donation from a stranger named W. B. Ajantha, who said he was following the example set by Buddhist monks and donating his kidney for free.

Dr. Dassanayake said the hospital has since discovered that Ajantha had been offering his kidney to various patients – taking small payments and requesting lodging for his family in advance. “He pretends he's going to give his kidney, asks for a couple of hundred rupees," Dassanayake said of Ajantha.

Dassanayake and Sampath said Ajantha had lived with Sampath’s family and relied on them for support for weeks before the operation. Sampath ended up getting his kidney from a cadaver. A few days after the surgery, Ajantha left the area. He could not be reached for comment.

Of late, Dassanayake said, some individuals and groups have emerged seeking to exploit the epidemic. To prevent problems, Dassanayake said his hospital only accepts kidney donations from Buddhist monks and relatives of patients, and prohibits donors from selling kidneys for a fee. He said he has seen people falsely claiming to be brothers in order for one to sell their kidney to the other, and other instances in which money changed hands between family members in exchange for a kidney donation.

"When people don't have a donor they get really frustrated and pluck at straws,” Dassanayake said. “There are various people and organizations who pretend to help people find a kidney as well, but I don't know a single patient who has found a kidney through one of these organizations.”

Anna Barry-Jester contributed to this report.