By John Davison/Reuters

BAALBEK, Lebanon – Seven-month-old Nour lives in a tarpaulin tent pitched on a muddy patch of earth in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. The tent, one of a dozen in a small refugee camp, contains a metal stove, a prayer mat and worn rugs on the floor. A leather jacket and a plastic mirror hang from nails hammered into its wooden beams.
Swaddled in a faded pink blanket against the cold, Nour is the first of her Syrian parents’ three children to be born as a refugee. Her family fled their native Homs at the start of Syria’s civil war. Crammed two to a seat in a bus, her parents and two older siblings traveled 70 miles into Lebanon, where Nour was born.
Now her mother and father, Asheqa and Trad, face a new challenge. They need to register Nour with a local government office in Lebanon by her first birthday in early September. A birth certificate is the crucial first step to securing Syrian citizenship. Without it, Nour could join a fast-growing generation of children who are stateless – lacking legal recognition as a citizen of any country.
UNREGISTERED: Asheqa holds her unregistered seven-month-old daughter Nour inside their tent in a refugee camp in Lebanon’s Bekaa valley. REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir
But as Nour’s parents are learning, even something as simple as registering a baby’s birth is fraught with hurdles for a refugee in Lebanon.

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Posted on May 16, 2016

By Allan Sloan/ProPublica

I’ve written about tax loopholes for decades. But recently, I wrote about Schlupflöcher for the first time, in a venture that shows how journalists can be as multinational as investment banks. We just make a lot less money.
What does Schlupflöcher mean? I’m glad you asked. It’s German for “loopholes.” Which is the topic that Cezary Podkul of ProPublica and I wrote about last week. We showed how German tax law allowed American mutual fund investors, American fund companies and (naturally) American investment banks to all profit at the expense of German taxpayers.

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Posted on May 14, 2016

By Julia Edwards/Reuters

WASHINGTON – U.S. immigration officials are planning a month-long series of raids in May and June to deport hundreds of Central American mothers and children found to have entered the country illegally, according to sources and an internal document seen by Reuters.
The operation would likely be the largest deportation sweep targeting immigrant families by the administration of President Barack Obama this year after a similar drive over two days in January that focused on Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina.
Those raids, which resulted in the detention of 121 people, mostly women and children, sparked an outcry from immigration advocates and criticism from some Democrats, including the party’s presidential election front-runner Hillary Clinton.

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Posted on May 13, 2016

By Cezary Podkul/ProPublica

German prosecutors have expanded an ongoing investigation of international tax-avoidance deals to cover questionable trades exposed last week by ProPublica and other media partners.
Handelsblatt, which collaborated on the report along with German public broadcaster ARD, reported that Commerzbank is the target of the new inquiry for its involvement in the trades, which cost German taxpayers $1 billion a year in forgone revenues.

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Posted on May 12, 2016

By Sarah Smith/ProPublica

The Obama administration has roundly criticized states such as North Carolina and Mississippi for passing laws that allow discrimination in the name of religious freedom.
But at the same time, the administration has left in place a 2007 memo from the Bush White House that allows religious charities with federal contracts to discriminate in hiring for federally funded programs.
Now, as Obama prepares to leave office, a group of prominent constitutional lawyers is calling on the president to revoke the legal memo, which they argue has been used by religious groups to refuse to provide services, including emergency contraception for human trafficking victims, that conflict with their beliefs.

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Posted on May 11, 2016

By David Epstein/ProPublica

In response to the nation’s devastating financial crisis, Milwaukee put in place policies to help people stay in their homes; for example, giving residents three years to pay property taxes before foreclosing.
But in “Landlord Games,” reporters from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel detailed how, eight years later, unscrupulous Milwaukee landlords are exploiting those policies.
What some landlords have figured out is that they can buy a property and collect rent but not pay taxes – while letting it fall into disrepair. Then three years later, they let the city repossess the property, which erases the tax bill. And then they do it again. And there appears to be scant penalty for shirking upkeep along the way.
As their properties deteriorated, the Journal Sentinel found, the landlords accumulated tens of thousands of dollars in fines for a wide variety of violations. But they were able to pay as little as $100 every few months and get extensions for the fine payments indefinitely.
ProPublica reporter David Epstein spoke with Journal Sentinel reporters Cary Spivak and Kevin Crowe about their remarkable investigation.

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Posted on May 10, 2016

By The Electronic Frontier Foundation

The “sharing” or “gig” economy is booming – you can get rides with companies like Uber, hire people to run errands with services like Taskrabbit, or find a place to stay on websites like Airbnb.
These companies connect people offering services to people purchasing them, and in the process they have access to vast amounts of personal data.
But how well do these companies protect your information from the government?
The sixth annual “Who Has Your Back” report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation surveyed the biggest providers in the gig economy to find out.

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Posted on May 9, 2016

By Paul Kiel/ProPublica

Millions of Americans live with the possibility that, at any moment, their wages or the cash in their bank accounts could be seized over an old debt. It’s an easily ignored part of America’s financial system, in part due to a common attitude that people who don’t pay their debts deserve what’s coming to them.
A couple of years ago, we set out to find out more about the growing use of the courts to collect consumer debts. How many lawsuits are filed? Who is filing them? Who is getting sued?
The suits are filed in state and local courts, and many states rely on antiquated systems or only keep data at the county level. We ultimately collected what details we could from a variety of states and large, urban counties. Then, we wrote a series of stories sharing what we found:

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Posted on May 6, 2016

By Cezary Podkul/ProPublica

Germany’s top finance official criticized controversial stock loans that allow U.S. and other foreign investors to avoid paying about $1 billion a year in dividend taxes in Germany.
“I think we made very clear that we were not happy about these activities,” Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said Wednesday.
He strongly suggested that banks discontinue the practice: “I am sure that all responsible banks and their boards will deal with this topic.”
Schäuble’s statement came a day after publication of a joint investigation by ProPublica, the Washington Post and the German news outlets ARD and Handelsblatt about the trades, which are arranged by U.S. and other banks using stocks borrowed from investment managers like Vanguard and BlackRock.

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Posted on May 5, 2016

By Cezary Podkul/ProPublica and Allan Sloan/Washington Post

German companies are known for paying some of the heftiest dividends among world stocks, one reason U.S. investment giants such as BlackRock and Vanguard are among the biggest holders of German shares.
But Wall Street has figured out a way to squeeze some extra income from these stocks. And German taxpayers pay for it.
A cache of confidential documents obtained by ProPublica and analyzed in collaboration with the Washington Post, German broadcaster ARD and the Handelsblatt newspaper in Düsseldorf details how Wall Street puts together complex stock-lending deals that drain an estimated $1 billion a year from the German treasury.
Similar deals extend beyond Germany, siphoning revenue from at least 20 other countries across four continents, according to the documents, which show how “dividend-arbitrage” transactions – known in the trade as “div-arb” – are structured and marketed as tax-avoidance vehicles.
The trove of transaction logs, e-mails, marketing materials, chat messages and other communications among deal participants involves a who’s who of the world’s big banks and institutional investors.

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Posted on May 4, 2016