The Morning Daily and local TV stories about the Robutrad scandal are most curious, not for what they report, but for what is missing.

What we have been told are the names of alleged time-card cheats. What we have not been told are the names of those who benefited from having work done at taxpayer expense.

Back on December 4, County Executive Maggie Brooks called a news conference to announce that she had gotten a tip that some union construction workers with Robutrad, created in 1989 to do work on county-owned property, had signed time cards, and collected pay from Monroe County, while not working on county projects. She said a "thorough investigation" resulted in the arrest of 14 union construction workers and the county employee who ran the operation, Robert Morone. Morone was then the Gates Republican chairman and a $600 donor to Brooks' campaigns.

Sheriff Patrick O'Flynn's investigators followed the men, recording where they were when they were drawing county pay.

District Attorney Mike Green said the men did no work in some cases, but in others worked on private projects. Green did not say who had work done for them.

Brooks singled out Morone for scorn: "It is an outrage to me that Morone and these 14 Robutrad members violated the trust of the public by stealing resources."

Brooks promised to recover any money improperly paid to the men and added, "No unethical, immoral, or illegal activity will be tolerated on my watch."

Significantly, Brooks made no promise to force the beneficiaries of this work to repay the county. She said nothing about ferreting out their identities and, if they knew they shouldn't have gotten the work, prosecuting them. Why such a glaring omission?

Now it could be, if the criminal charges are proven, that the 15 were just small-time chiselers who, say, remodeled a kitchen, work they won with low-ball bids because the county was paying their wages.

It also could be, however, that work was done for politically connected citizens of Monroe County, people with clout, long before Brooks was alerted.

There are two sides to this equation. One is who paid for the work. The other is who benefited from having work done.

To expose a criminal conspiracy, the authorities often have to make a deal, persuading one crook to rat out others. Taxpayers should watch Green's handling of this closely.

O'Flynn, Green - and presumably Brooks - know for whom some recent work was done at county expense. Why don't taxpayers know?

Also important is whether the 14 unionists were maliciously cheating the county or just doing what they were told. Given who had the power to keep them employed, they may be pawns, not predators.

If the Robutrad 14 were just going where they were told, is it justice to charge them as felons?

And if the 14 acted on orders, then the story is entirely different from the tenor of the news reports. Then this would be a scandal about corrupt administration of the county government and the corrupt use of law enforcement to contain that scandal. If that were the case, this could be a story of using the power to threaten people with prison to protect the real culprits by only prosecuting scapegoats.

It may be that nothing like that is going on here, that no one in politics had work done for them. We do not know.

The questions that taxpayers deserve answers to are: 1) Who in the last decade or so had work done for them by Robutrad workers? 2) Will they be publicly identified? 3) Will law enforcement look into whether they knew, or should have known, they were getting taxpayer-financed work, and if they did, sue and prosecute them?

David Cay Johnston of Brighton is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of the bestsellers "Free Lunch" and "Perfectly Legal."