Today in accountability news:

• Top execs from the biggest U.S. steelmakers are lobbying for more insfrastructure work and less regulation, reports The Wall Street Journal. They're warning legislators that stricter limits on carbon emissions would make American steel more expensive than steel from other countries.
• Auditors find the government's EnergyStar program, run by the EPA and the Department of Energy, is highly vulnerable to fraud, reports The New York Times. The Energy Department has pledged to strengthen the program.
• More details have emerged tying the Pope closer to the German sex abuse scandal: A decades-old memo alerted the future Pope Benedict XVI that a child-molesting priest would be returning to pastoral work days after beginning psychiatric treatment, reports The New York Times.
• More than a dozen Wall Street firms--including JP Morgan Chase, Lehman Brothers, and UBS--were named as conspirators in a scheme to pay below-market interest rates to U.S. state and local governments, reports Bloomberg.
• Bank of America and Wells Fargo--the country's first and fourth largest banks, respectively--will likely avoid having to pay federal taxes due to big recession-time losses, according to McClatchy.
• A Pentagon report points finger at the Department of Defense for wasting $4.6 million of a $5 million contract with megacontractor KBR. Mother Jones reports that KBR's mechanics performed less than 7 percent of the work they were expected to do.

These stories are part of our ongoing roundup of investigations from other news outlets. For more, visit our Investigations Elsewhere page.