According to this article a woman in Houston named Marsha Farmer has spent the past seven years exposing a scam in the city's Department of Housing and Community Development.  In 2001 when her home was damaged in a flood and 17 months later she received an estimate from a contractor in the city's home repair program and realized that the numbers didn't add up.  Unfortunately for the contractor and the Department she had a background in bookkeeping and construction as well as a strong sense of right and wrong and she spent the next seven years exposing the sham.  All the while her home was never repaired until the Houston newspaper got hold of her story and starting asking questions, so now repairs are finally scheduled to be done.  The following excerpt from the article shows what a person with a little know-how, a lot of gumption and access to Google can do:

She was placed on a waiting list, and after her house flooded during
Tropical Storm Allison in June 2001, her case was assigned to the
Houston Area Urban League, one of four nonprofit home repair
contractors working with the city.

Four months later, Farmer received a letter from the city saying her
house had been approved for repairs. Nothing more happened until the
day in June 2002 when she saw the report that triggered her suspicions
about the program.

Over the course of the next year, Farmer complained to HUD about her
own case, obtained files on other repair jobs under open records laws
and began compiling a database.

In her examination of Urban League files covering more than two
years, Farmer found that the city paid for excessive roofing material
in at least 18 of 24 projects. She found charges for installing a
400-foot sewer line and a 300-foot water line, even though in most
places these lines are about 50 feet from the house to the main
connection.

Almost half of the files she examined showed that bids were for exactly the program limit of $20,000.

It's not clear who benefited from the overpayments. The city
essentially outsourced the program to the Urban League and other
nonprofits, which paid companies that did the repairs based on
often-erroneous quantities determined by initial inspections.

There's much more in the article, including the fact that she unsuccessfully sued as a "whistle blower" under the False Claims Act which would have entitled her to compensation, but even in losing that lawsuit her key role in exposing the fraud was acknowledged by the judge:

And we also learn that her contributions were not insignificant:

Two months after Farmer filed her lawsuit, HUD shut down Houston's
home repair program. The agency cited evidence of poor workmanship and
"huge differences between the estimates of materials needed and the
actual units of materials applied" — the same problem Farmer had
noticed in the estimate for her house.

HUD allowed the program to resume the following year, subject to the
city's agreement to reinspect and, where necessary, repair 2,214
previously repaired houses by July 31, 2010. Farmer's review of 530
reinspection reports — about one-fourth of the total to be performed —
identified $717,000 in overcharges.

What I like about this story is that it shows the importance of oversight in government affairs, the power of individual citizens to make a difference and the important role that media plays in our daily lives.  Let's be honest, if the newspaper hadn't been there to put the screws to the government Ms. Farmer might not be getting her home repaired any time soon. She's made their lives miserable so what would their motivation have been to help her?  But bad publicity tends to motivate people and as soon as the newspaper exposed the government's (in)actions to hundreds of thousands of people they suddenly had a fire lit under them.

I know that at times I've given the folks at the Winston-Salem Journal a hard time on this blog, but believe me when I say I want them to figure things out and succeed.  We need them almost as much as they need us.