TOY STORY When we went shopping in five states, we found numerous toys with problems ranging from inappropriate labeling to small parts that could choke children.

Investigating for our November 2004 report on dangerous products, our reporters followed the trail of items banned from sale in the U.S. because they didn’t comply with safety standards. They knew that the law seldom requires that the products be destroyed. So where do those items go? The reporters’ first stop: the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the federal agency responsible for protecting the public from serious injury or death from more than 15,000 consumer products. It took time and a lot of digging to piece together what happened. CPSC regulations and systems didn’t allow for speed.

It turns out that though unsafe products are banned from sale in the U.S., the law allows companies to send some goods to countries willing to take them. A manufacturer must notify the CPSC 30 days before exporting; the CPSC generally alerts officials in the recipient country that a dicey product is about to hit their shores. It’s up to that country to accept or reject the goods.

Ideally, you and I should be able to find out which products have been kept off the U.S. market, why, and what happened to them. But a lot of safety information is hidden under a mound of paperwork. Consumer Reports filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the CPSC seeking access to some of those records. Our reporters eventually obtained the commission’s export spreadsheets, but the agency couldn’t say what the exported products were or when and how they had been recalled without first notifying the manufacturers, as the law requires. The reporters tried to match export records with CPSC press releases about recalled models. But since the export records didn’t include model names, that was a challenge. They turned to the commission’s annual reports, which include actions it took each year. That’s when they discovered that most CPSC enforcement actions aren’t included in the recall press releases on the agency’s Web site: While consumers have been told about 5,252 public recalls since 1990, thousands more “corrective actions” have never been publicized.

More FOIA requests followed, this time for CPSC records of manufacturers’ letters of intent to export recalled products. That’s how our reporters at last confirmed that many of the exported products were the same products that had been recalled. Millions of hazardous goods, including children’s toys, cribs, and pajamas, had been shipped abroad, often to countries in Latin America and the Caribbean that lack the consumer protections that Americans take for granted. A safe and happy ending for kids in the U.S., but a potential tragedy for consumers around the world.

Jim Guest President