InvestigateWest series on potential Medicaid fraud prompts federal probe
Federal authorities are investigating an Idaho anti-trafficking nonprofit after InvestigateWest, a Seattle-based nonprofit newsroom, published a three-part series revealing a potential Medicaid fraud scheme linked to the safe house program.
InvestigateWest’s series, written by news and investigations editor Wilson Criscione and investigative reporter Kelsey Turner, reported that the nonprofit, Community Outreach Behavioral Services, has close ties to a for-profit counseling company that provides services to human trafficking survivors in its safe houses. That company, owned by the nonprofit founder’s son, billed Medicaid for services that some former residents say they didn’t receive.
Survivors and anti-trafficking advocates in Idaho have voiced concerns to state agencies about what they said were exploitative practices used to recruit and keep people in the safe houses, but InvestigateWest’s reporting revealed that complaints have largely been met with inaction.
Criscione and Turner spent about six months investigating the nonprofit, conducting dozens of interviews and gathering public records, Criscione said. ProJourn — a partnership between the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Microsoft, Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to provide journalists no-cost legal help with pre-publication review, public records access, and newsroom operations-related legal needs — connected InvestigateWest with Jessica Ogden and Jason Criss, attorneys from the New York office of Covington & Burling LLP, who provided free legal vetting before the stories were published in July.
“As executive director of a small newsroom with just 10 full-time staffers, we don’t typically have access to top-notch lawyers to vet our work,” said InvestigateWest’s Jacob Fries. “ProJourn has been an incredible service for us on this story and others.”
Shawn Vestal, the newsroom’s editor and operations coordinator, said he could tell the attorneys who vetted the story understood and appreciated journalists’ work. That’s not always been the case in his experience working with attorneys, he said, and he thinks it made the story stronger.
“I’ve worked in smaller newsrooms where it was left to relatively inexperienced editors to try to vet each and every sentence, each and every line, and to see the angles from a legal perspective,” Fries said. “ProJourn has enabled us to do that on our most ambitious work, and we’ve been really grateful to have access to lawyers who can scrutinize our work, make sure that we’re protected.”