From a tiny makeshift office in an Uptown New Orleans home, Sandy Rosenthal has quite the following.

Her non-profit group Levees.org now boasts 20,000 members and acts as a prominent watchdog group over the Army Corps of Engineers.

"What happened here is going to happen elsewhere and very soon unless we know happen how can we take the steps to build the levees right in the future," Rosenthal said.

But now she’s accusing the Corps of paying one group to run what she calls a “spin campaign.”

"To cover up the Corps’ mistakes in the flooding, to intimidate anyone who tried to intervene and probably the worst thing is to delay releasing the results of the study until the publics attention had turned elsewhere, eight months after the storm,” Rosenthal said.

She is referring to the American Society of Engineers, the group the Corps paid to review the official report of what went wrong with the levees following Hurricane Katrina.

"We put in a request through the Freedom of Information Act to take a look at the grant, and we found something we weren't expecting,” Rosenthal said.

She said the research director of Levees.org, H.J. Bosworth Jr., discovered the evidence by accident, while looking through the grant documents.

"There was a line describing an activity,” Bosworth said. “The activity said you will receive a certain amount of money for sharing lessons learned with the Corps and its consultancy community.Does that mean the Corps is going to pay them to give speeches? We think that's what it means."

A representative with the engineering group told the Associated Press they take the allegations seriously, but declined to comment to investigate disasters.

"The Society understated the role of the Corps mistakes and tried to overstate the role of the storm,” Rosenthal said.

Now she is calling for an independent investigation into the Corps’ role, and she hopes to receive the backing of lawmakers in Washington to get that legislation passed.

"We can't get on with it until we know exactly what went wrong,” Rosenthal said.

In a statement sent to Eyewitness News late Wednesday evening, a spokesman with the Corps said it never paid the engineering group to falsify information about the levee failures.

"The Corps funded ASCE for their reviews, analysis, travel and some administrative costs,” Wade J. Habshey Jr., said in the statement. “All 14 members of the ASCE are nationally respected engineers with impeccable reputations who stake their professional reputations on this work.".