The following is a transcript of a report by Team 4's Jim Parsons that first aired April 28, 2008, on WTAE Channel 4 Action News at 5 p.m.

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Last year, a Team 4 hidden camera investigation exposed Pittsburgh-area funeral homes trying to sell expensive package deals to consumers instead of giving them an itemized list of prices, which is something they're required to do by law.

Following the Team 4 investigation, the Federal Trade Commission sent undercover agents posing as consumers to 33 funeral homes around Pittsburgh. The FTC said 20 of those businesses had minor deficiencies in the way they presented their prices, and four funeral homes had serious violations.

But the FTC refuses to tell consumers exactly what the funeral homes did that was wrong.

Federal Trade Commission agents made two undercover visits to Rowland Cooke Funeral Home in Wilkinsburg. According to FTC documents, the agents discovered significant violations of the federal funeral rule, which governs pricing for services and products. It was the first time the FTC ever conducted a funeral rule sweep in Pittsburgh.

"The FTC is sort of undermanned and trying to do the best they can, and I think these sweeps are helpful from time to time to keep everybody on their toes," said Rep. Mike Doyle.

But the FTC refused to make public the nature of the violations at Cooke Funeral Home. Details of the violations are whited out from the documents that Team 4 requested.

"What part of the funeral rule did they violate?" asked Josh Slocum of the National Funeral Consumers Alliance. "Did they not give you a price list? Was the price list itself insufficient?"

Slocum accuses the FTC of protecting the funeral home industry instead of consumers.

"In an era when we have product safety recalls, when there are press releases put out that help people decide what kind of food stuffs are safe, what kind of toys are safe, why shouldn't consumers who are engaging on one of the most emotionally fraught transactions they'll ever be in not have the same information?" said Slocum.

The FTC also refuses to reveal the nature of serious violations of the funeral rule it claims to have found at three other local businesses, including Spriggs-Watson Funeral Home in Homewood, Trenz Funeral Home in Penn Hills and Olechowicz Funeral Home on Pittsburgh's South Side.

Supervisors at all three, as well as Cooke Funeral Home, told Team 4 that the undercover agents walked in at a busy time, and they might not have given them the required itemized price list.

East Pittsburgh Funeral Director Pat Lanigan was also visited by undercover FTC agents, who later sent him a compliance letter claiming his business committed "very serious violations of the (funeral) rule." But the details of those violations were erased from the copy of the letter the FTC sent to Team 4.

"In my case, somebody could make up any story in any figment from their imagination about what I did wrong, and we didn't do anything wrong," said Lanigan. "Actually, it was just a misinterpretation by the FTC of our price list."

The FTC took no action against Lanigan, but it did require the other four to enter the Funeral Rule Offenders Program, a three-year educational program operated not by the government but by the funeral home industry itself.

And that's the trade-off for offenders. They agree to enter the FROP program, and the public will never find out what they did wrong.

"Unfortunately, until the FTC starts coming clean with the public about what they're finding, consumers are going to have to take on even more of the burden," said Slocum. "They need to educate themselves. People really need to shop around and make some careful choices before the death occurs. That's really what is going to save most families heartache."

Helpful consumer information for purchasing a funeral can be found at www.ftc.gov and the Funeral Consumers Alliance in South Burlington, Vt.

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