@NCCapitol

How we reported our investigation on North Carolina settlement agreements

To see just how prevalent settlement agreements are inked at the state, county and local level, nine news organizations from the mountains to the coast submitted 61 requests to public agencies across the state.

Posted 2019-03-08T23:00:27+00:00 - Updated 2019-03-11T09:00:00+00:00

Tyler Dukes

, WRAL investigative reporter

When public agencies settle to avoid or end lawsuits, taxpayers foot the bill.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. But those payments don’t always unfold in full view of the public either.

To see just how prevalent these kinds of deals are inked at the state, county and local level, nine news organizations from the mountains to the coast submitted 61 requests to public agencies across the state.

This story was reported and written in cooperation with the Sunshine Center of the North Carolina Open Government Coalition as part of Sunshine Week, an annual effort to highlight open records and open meetings laws and their important role in transparency and accountable government.

Behind the scenes of government, millions in payouts and little transparency

The coalition, based at Elon University, brings together news organizations, government representatives and others interested in educating the public about the benefits of open government and expanding the rights of all citizens to gain access to public documents and meetings.

Partners in this project included the Associated Press, Carolina Public Press, The Charlotte Observer, The Herald-Sun, The Fayetteville Observer, The News & Observer, WECT, WRAL News and WUNC. Reports were shared and published jointly in varying formats by all news organizations the week of Sunshine Week 2019, March 11.

Reporters in January asked for all settlement agreements from each agency for the last five years (see below for a full list).

Reporters also requested supplemental data about the settlement payouts from the Office of the State Controller, which manages the accounting for state agencies in North Carolina.

For some agencies with a high volume of settlement agreements – the Department of Health and Human Services of the Department of Transportation, for example – reporters narrowed their requests to exclude some categories of agreements based on discussions with the agency.

Some agencies also released documents in rolling batches, and some did not completely respond to the request by press time. Reporters will continue to gather documents from these agencies until the requests are fulfilled.

Until the end of the project, agencies were not explicitly told the requests were connected with a statewide project for Sunshine Week.

Search the documents: Settlement agreements in North Carolina

All records received in connection with the project, as well as a spreadsheet tracking response times and details, were shared among the news organizations. Those records are also available and searchable publicly via DocumentCloud, a platform for annotating and sharing records.

Requests were sent to the following agencies: