"I'd never heard of JWOD. It sounded like something you scraped off your shoe after going for a walk." --Les Zaitz, reporter for The Oregonian

Could a well-intentioned government program become a cash machine for businessmen bent on enriching themselves at the expense of the disabled? In 1971, Congress created a program to channel federal contracts to charities that train and employ workers who are blind or have severe disabilities. Known as JWOD (named after the law that created it, the Javits-Wagner-O'Day Act), it eventually came to have a $2 billion dollar budget. But no one, it appears, was keeping track of where that money was going, until journalists from The Oregonian decided to have a look. What they found was abuse of the system and anemic oversight resulting in a massive bilking of taxpayers and precious few jobs for the genuinely disabled.

Read a selection of articles from The Oregonian's original reporting and the paper's most recent articles on disability programs and the workplace.