Why investigative journalism is important No one likes to be harassed by people who will not take "no" for an answer, even when they insist that the unwanted attention is for a good cause. We at The Sunday Telegraph were responding to complaints from the public when we began to investigate "chugging," or "charity mugging," the practice of soliciting donations from members of the public on the street, with the intention of getting them to sign up to a regular monthly payment. We spoke to former employees of Tag, one of the biggest companies employed by charities to raise money in this way. They were concerned that the rules were being broken to meet unrealistic fundraising targets. We undertook our investigation to establish whether those claims were true. There was a key public interest at stake: transparency, truthfulness and politeness are essential to proper fundraising. People should not donate to charity because they have been bullied, deceived or misled. It was clear that the only way we could expose the abuses would be to send a reporter to work undercover for Tag. We took that step only after careful thought and consultation with our lawyers. This newspaper greatly supports the work of charities and has no objection to street fundraising in principle; our concern was to expose abuses that affected the public and might also damage the reputations of worthy organisations. Armed with a hidden camera, our reporter amassed a wealth of evidence that Tag was breaking codes of conduct or the law: it did not inform members of the public, as charity law requires, of the costs - typically hundreds of thousands of pounds - of running street campaigns. Our report prompted the Fundraising Standards Board (FRSB) - the independent watchdog that regulates the way charities raise money - to launch its own investigation into Tag. That investigation is published today. It endorses our original findings. Tag has been reprimanded by the FRSB for permitting the sort of behaviour that we uncovered. To test whether the new standards of conduct are adhered to, the FRSB intends to monitor the firm's procedures on the street for the next 12 months. The FRSB's vindication of our original report shows the importance of well-conducted investigative journalism. It is notable that, while the watchdog has the power to investigate the way charities raise money, it took a newspaper probe to reveal that some "chugging" had been unlawful and illegitimate. Our exposure of malpractice has benefited the charities themselves. Marie Curie Cancer Care, a charity that raises money to care for the terminally ill, hired Tag to gather street donations for it, but it was not aware that some of Tag's trainers and street fundraisers were behaving in an unacceptable way. Marie Curie Cancer Care was damaged by that ignorance. It has been able to repair the damage, but only because it was able to discover what was going on. That again helps to show the value and importance of accurate, carefully researched investigative journalism: exposing malpractice helps to eliminate it.