David Evans, 2011 Chancellor Award Winner
About the Winner
David Evans, a senior writer for Bloomberg Markets magazine, has a history of reporting timely and significant stories that effect great change. His tenacious reporting highlights practices that effect peoples’ lives in negative ways they might not expect.
Over the past two decades, Evans’ stories have taken him behind the scenes at companies, hospitals, schools and government agencies to reveal how secret profit schemes have cost taxpayers billions, cheated and betrayed the families of fallen U.S soldiers, sickened and killed patients, wrongly punished students and caused the largest global financial meltdown since the Great Depression. Congress, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Securities and Exchange Commission have had to write new rules as a result of Evans’ work.
Evans’ financial reporting is prescient. Time and again, his pieces have predicted failures in the market – from the collapse of regional banks and the FDIC running out of money to the collapse of Wall Street as a result of its opaque bond investments laden with subprime mortgage debt. “The Ratings Charade” (July 2007) was the first story to shed light on how steeped Wall Street was in the debt market, and the story coined a term we’ve become well acquainted with in the years since – “toxic debt.”
In 2011, he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for “Fallen Soldiers,” his exposé of how life insurance companies have turned death into a $28 billion profit center, retaining money belonging to survivors of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as civilians.
A graduate of the University of Southern California Law Center, Evans spent five years prosecuting fraud for the U.S. government as a trial attorney for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission before transitioning into journalism. He has worked for Bloomberg News since 1992, and has been on the staff at Bloomberg Markets magazine since 2002.
Works by David Evans
“Duping the Families of Fallen Soldiers”: Evans’ investigation shows how MetLife, Prudential and more than 130 life insurance companies concocted a scheme to withhold – and profit from - $28 billion in death benefits owed to families of service members. Prudential was issuing survivors checkbooks instead of lump-sum checks. These retained-asset accounts allowed Prudential to draw interest on this money – upwards of eight times the amount they were paying out to the beneficiaries. (Bloomberg Markets, September 2010)
“The Hidden Pension Fiasco”: In 2009, Evans examined the looming crisis in public retirement funds across the U.S. His story foretells how future generations will be saddled with a $1 trillion tax liability as the result of underfunding and poor investments in these funds. (Bloomberg Markets, April 2009)
“The Ratings Charade”: Evans, with reporter Richard Tomlison, published this investigation detailing Wall Street’s dangerous dalliances with the debt market. The story, published in July 2007, predicted that subprime mortgage debt would cripple Wall Street – a collapse that began in October of that year. The story coined the term “toxic debt.” (Bloomberg Markets, July 2007)
“How Test Companies Fail Your Kids”: This investigation into the $2.8 billion academic assessment business revealed an industry rampant with problems. With fellow Bloomberg reporter David Glovin, Evans showed that these testing companies had profit margins of 20 percent on their test preparation packages while hiring $10-an-hour graders for exams that determined the fate of schools and students. The largest testing companies regularly made errors in the reporting of exam scores
. (Bloomberg Markets, December 2006)
“Big Pharma’s Shameful Secret”: Along with colleagues Michael Smith and Liz Willen, Evans showed how the $14 billion dollar experimental drug trial industry put lives at risk. The investigation found a lack of oversight in the outsourcing of drug trials to for-profit companies, leaving individuals at risk of illness and death.
In 2006, AIR: America’s Investigative Reports broadcast an episode detailing the reporting of this project. (Bloomberg Markets, December 2005)
The Ceremony
On November 19, 2011 at Columbia University's Low Library, colleagues of Evans' spoke of their experiences working with him over the years. The final speech of the evening came from Cindy Lohman who was a source for Evans in his investigation into insurance companies profiting from loop holes in death benefits owed to families of service members.
Speeches in order of appearance:
Robert MacNeil, Partner, MacNeil/Lehrer Productions
Jay Gourley, Former CNN reporter
Matthew Winkler, Editor-in-Chief, Bloomberg News
Jonathan Neumann, Senior Editor, Bloomberg Markets
Elise J. Bean, of the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations
Cindy Lohman, Mother, Sgt. Ryan Baumann, U.S. Army/101st Airborne Division, KIA August 1, 2008 Afghanistan
Ira A. Lipman, Founder, Presenter of the John Chancellor Award
David Evans, Senior Writer and Award Recipient, Bloomberg Markets
