Undercover Reporting

The series examines welfare inefficiencies - and the ease with which some who are not needy can take advantage of the aid - based on six months of reporting, including Ed May's three-month undercover stint as a welfare case worker in Erie County, New York. 

Reporter Woody Klein spends a month living in a New York City slum for a New York World Telegram & Sun series in 1959.

After hearing from a source that janitors, without washing, were sometimes used to move patients from surgery rooms to their beds, a  reporter poses as a janitor at Von Solbrig Hospital. The series, a Task Force investigation, also examines the institution's encouragement of unnecessary procedures for welfare patients.

Waste, fraud, graft, laxity, dilapidated conditions, corruption: Reporters have often used undercover tactics to investigate.