FEATURED EDITORIAL:
HOME FEATURED EDITORIAL
Published on June 27, 2016
In the wake of tragedy or natural disaster, Americans want to help. Many send money electronically or write a check to the American Red Cross.
What organization could be more solid? People have long trusted that the Red Cross would responsibly apply their contributions.
Not so, apparently.
A U.S. Senate investigation into how the agency managed a half billion dollars in donations for relief following the Haiti earthquake in 2010 not only raises questions about how the Red Cross handled donor funds, but reveals troubling details about its operations.
Sen. Charles Grassley (R., Iowa) has released a 300-page report so disturbing that a shakeup at the charity seems in order. Other members of Congress recommend an independent outside auditor — on a permanent basis.
● The Red Cross has long told the public that 91 percent of contributions go directly to clients in need. But this cannot be verified in the case of Haiti. There is no evidence for such a number. It was hype, a sales pitch, a lie.
● In Haiti, other groups were sub-contracted to do work the Red Cross lacked the manpower or expertise to accomplish. Much of that work was never done. But those groups charged another 11 percent in administrative costs.
● The Red Cross collected almost $500 million for Haiti and built only six permanent homes there. Six.
● The report says the Red Cross attempted to stymie and was not open with federal authorities.
The public first came to know what the charity was doing — or not doing — from media reports. Senator Grassley launched his investigation after learning about Red Cross handling of funding and other matters from National Public Media and ProPublica. The senator concluded that a whopping 25 percent, or $125 million, of the $500 million received from donations for Haiti, was used for in-house expenses.
Some 1.5 million Haitians’ homes were destroyed. Six homes is scandal.
The Grassley report reveals that additional funds were spent on oversight, to ensure proper use of Haiti aid. However, the senator’s office learned that the organization “is unable to provide any financial evidence that oversight activities in fact occurred.”
Senator Grassley’s office also said Gail McGovern, chief executive officer of the charity, made false statements as to whether it cooperated with congressional investigators. He said there was little cooperation with federal authorities, and that after a year of talking back and forth with the Red Cross, “We did not get satisfactory answers. It was like pulling teeth.”
The Red Cross could not even provide a complete list of all its projects in Haiti.
American Red Cross leaders have obviously forgotten that they are accountable to the public, and have a higher duty to keep faith with both their givers and those in need. It broke faith with both.
The American Red Cross has now been tainted and needs a complete leadership overhaul.
It also needs a watchdog.
Finally, someone needs to go to jail here. Fraud on the backs of almost unfathomable human suffering is about as shameless as shameless gets.
http://www.toledoblade.com/Featured-Editorial-Home/2016/06/27/A-tarnished-Red-Cross.html
Affichage des articles dont le libellé est AMERICAN RED CROSS AND THE MONEY FOR HAITIAN RELIEF. Afficher tous les articles
Affichage des articles dont le libellé est AMERICAN RED CROSS AND THE MONEY FOR HAITIAN RELIEF. Afficher tous les articles
lundi 27 juin 2016
American Red Cross exposed as massive, incompetent fraud: built just six homes after collecting half a billion dollars in Haiti earthquake donations
Sunday, June 26, 2016
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Tags: American Red Cross, Haiti earthquake, donations fraud
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/054476_American_Red_Cross_Haiti_earthquake_donations_fraud.html#ixzz4CmJrGY6Y The Red Cross received an outpouring of donations after the quake, nearly half a billion dollars.
The group has publicly celebrated its work. But in fact, the Red Cross has repeatedly failed on the ground in Haiti. Confidential memos, emails from worried top officers, and accounts of a dozen frustrated and disappointed insiders show the charity has broken promises, squandered donations, and made dubious claims of success.
The Red Cross says it has provided homes to more than 130,000 people. But the actual number of permanent homes the group has built in all of Haiti: six.
In effect, the Red Cross exploited the Haiti earthquake as a way to get gullible donors to wipe out its massive operational debt. Check this out:
Inside the Red Cross, the Haiti disaster was seen as "a spectacular fundraising opportunity," recalled one former official who helped organize the effort. Michelle Obama, the NFL and a long list of celebrities appealed for donations to the group.
The Red Cross kept soliciting money well after it had enough for the emergency relief that is the group's stock in trade. Doctors Without Borders, in contrast, stopped fundraising off the earthquake after it decided it had enough money. The donations to the Red Cross helped the group erase its more-than $100 million deficit.
The American Red Cross: Where donation money disappears into a massive bureaucratic black hole
So what did the Red Cross actually do? Like all big bureaucracies, its top officials all stood around shoving thumbs up each other's asses and calling it "success." Via ProPublica:
The Red Cross' initial plan said the focus would be building homes -- an internal proposal put the number at 700. Each would have finished floors, toilets, showers, even rainwater collection systems. The houses were supposed to be finished in January 2013. None of that ever happened. Carline Noailles, who was the project's manager in Washington, said it was endlessly delayed because the Red Cross "didn't have the know-how."
So the Red Cross collects half a billion dollars from gullible donors, but doesn't know how to build homes for the victims it claimed to be helping? This reality reeks of so much waste that I'm now nominating the Red Cross to be a full-fledged government agency, where it's amazing waste-amplified talents can be put to use on a larger scale, wasting far more taxpayer money than ever thought possible.
Millions spent teaching impoverished children with no water or soap how to wash their hands
While all the Red Cross's home building plans were being laughed off the table, the organization decided to use its half a billion dollars in funding to -- and I'm not even making this up -- teach hand washing skills to children who have no water and no soap. F-Yeah! Why didn't I think of that?
Instead of making concrete improvements to living conditions, the Red Cross has launched hand-washing education campaigns. The internal evaluation noted that these were "not effective when people had no access to water and no soap." (The Red Cross declined to comment on the project.)
You might think that somebody at the Red Cross would first realize that washing hands requires running water, but that would be giving them way too much credit. It's not about actually helping people, you see... it's all about raising money to raise Red Cross salaries and bonuses!
Bottom line: If you give a single dollar to the American Red Cross, you're a fool. The organization is a fraud. Pick a more honest non-profit next time, and do your homework before giving money to these donation fat cats who pay themselves huge salaries and bonuses while doing next to nothing to actually help real people in the real world.
SOURCE: Propublica.org
http://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-re... Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/054476_American_Red_Cross_Haiti_earthquake_donations_fraud.html#ixzz4CmJ0Qra3
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Tags: American Red Cross, Haiti earthquake, donations fraud
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/054476_American_Red_Cross_Haiti_earthquake_donations_fraud.html#ixzz4CmJrGY6Y The Red Cross received an outpouring of donations after the quake, nearly half a billion dollars.
The group has publicly celebrated its work. But in fact, the Red Cross has repeatedly failed on the ground in Haiti. Confidential memos, emails from worried top officers, and accounts of a dozen frustrated and disappointed insiders show the charity has broken promises, squandered donations, and made dubious claims of success.
The Red Cross says it has provided homes to more than 130,000 people. But the actual number of permanent homes the group has built in all of Haiti: six.
In effect, the Red Cross exploited the Haiti earthquake as a way to get gullible donors to wipe out its massive operational debt. Check this out:
Inside the Red Cross, the Haiti disaster was seen as "a spectacular fundraising opportunity," recalled one former official who helped organize the effort. Michelle Obama, the NFL and a long list of celebrities appealed for donations to the group.
The Red Cross kept soliciting money well after it had enough for the emergency relief that is the group's stock in trade. Doctors Without Borders, in contrast, stopped fundraising off the earthquake after it decided it had enough money. The donations to the Red Cross helped the group erase its more-than $100 million deficit.
The American Red Cross: Where donation money disappears into a massive bureaucratic black hole
So what did the Red Cross actually do? Like all big bureaucracies, its top officials all stood around shoving thumbs up each other's asses and calling it "success." Via ProPublica:
The Red Cross' initial plan said the focus would be building homes -- an internal proposal put the number at 700. Each would have finished floors, toilets, showers, even rainwater collection systems. The houses were supposed to be finished in January 2013. None of that ever happened. Carline Noailles, who was the project's manager in Washington, said it was endlessly delayed because the Red Cross "didn't have the know-how."
So the Red Cross collects half a billion dollars from gullible donors, but doesn't know how to build homes for the victims it claimed to be helping? This reality reeks of so much waste that I'm now nominating the Red Cross to be a full-fledged government agency, where it's amazing waste-amplified talents can be put to use on a larger scale, wasting far more taxpayer money than ever thought possible.
Millions spent teaching impoverished children with no water or soap how to wash their hands
While all the Red Cross's home building plans were being laughed off the table, the organization decided to use its half a billion dollars in funding to -- and I'm not even making this up -- teach hand washing skills to children who have no water and no soap. F-Yeah! Why didn't I think of that?
Instead of making concrete improvements to living conditions, the Red Cross has launched hand-washing education campaigns. The internal evaluation noted that these were "not effective when people had no access to water and no soap." (The Red Cross declined to comment on the project.)
You might think that somebody at the Red Cross would first realize that washing hands requires running water, but that would be giving them way too much credit. It's not about actually helping people, you see... it's all about raising money to raise Red Cross salaries and bonuses!
Bottom line: If you give a single dollar to the American Red Cross, you're a fool. The organization is a fraud. Pick a more honest non-profit next time, and do your homework before giving money to these donation fat cats who pay themselves huge salaries and bonuses while doing next to nothing to actually help real people in the real world.
SOURCE: Propublica.org
http://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-re... Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/054476_American_Red_Cross_Haiti_earthquake_donations_fraud.html#ixzz4CmJ0Qra3
lundi 20 juin 2016
Senator to Red Cross: Public has ‘right to know’ how Haiti money was spent
HAITI
JUNE 17, 2016 5:02 PM
- Senate report released this week calls into question how the charity spent money meant for Haiti after the 2010 earthquake
- Report says there are ‘substantial and fundamental concerns’ about the organization
- A full 25 percent of the donated money was spent on fundraising, management, a contingency fund and ‘program costs’
A blistering Senate report on the American Red Cross raises fundamental questions about the integrity of the country’s most storied charity and its stewardship of donors’ dollars.
The report, which was released this week by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and contains nearly 300 pages of supporting documents, found:
▪ After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the Red Cross spent tens of millions of dollars more than it has previously acknowledged on internal expenses. The Red Cross told Grassley that the money was largely spent on oversight to make sure the Haiti aid was used properly. But Grassley’s office found that the charity “is unable to provide any financial evidence that oversight activities in fact occurred."
▪ Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern made false statements to Grassley’s office about whether the charity cooperated with congressional investigators.
▪ McGovern and her subordinates have kept the charity’s own internal investigations and ethics unit “severely undermanned and underfunded.” The charity is “reluctant to support the very unit that is designed to police wrongdoing within the organization.”
There are “substantial and fundamental concerns about [the Red Cross] as an organization,” the report concludes.
In an interview about the report, Grassley said that even after a year of back-and-forth with the Red Cross, “we did not get satisfactory answers. It was like pulling teeth.”
Grassley launched his investigation following stories by ProPublica and NPR on Red Cross failures in providing disaster relief, including after the Haiti earthquake. The group raised nearly half a billion dollars after the disaster, more than any other nonprofit. But our reporting found that, for example, an ambitious plan to build housing resulted in just six permanent homes.
Red Cross officials, including McGovern, have repeatedly told the public that the charity retains 9 percent of donations to cover management and administrative costs. But Grassley found that a full 25 percent of donations — or around $125 million — were spent on fundraising and management, a contingency fund, and a vague, catchall category the Red Cross calls “program costs.”
On top of that 25 percent, the Red Cross sent the bulk of the donated money to other nonprofits to do the work on the ground. Those other nonprofits then took their own cuts for overhead costs — as much as 11 percent.
Over a year of written exchanges with Grassley’s staff, the Red Cross repeatedly revised its figures for the same projects.
“The most important thing (from the report) is an unwillingness to level with the people about exactly where the money went,” Grassley said in the interview. “There’s too many questions in regard to how the money was spent in Haiti that it gives me cause to wonder about money being donated for other national disasters.”
“One of the reasons they don’t want to answer the questions is it’s very embarrassing,” Grassley added.
In a statement, the Red Cross said that while it has not yet seen the senator’s report, the charity and McGovern have been transparent, and donors’ money was properly spent. The statement says the costs of the projects are “entirely justifiable given the size and complexity of the Haiti program, the scale of the destruction and the challenging and sometimes dangerous conditions of working in Haiti.”
The Red Cross was created by congressional charter more than a century ago, and receives a range of special benefits from the government.
Here are more details from the report:
On a page recently added to its website, the Red Cross says the so-called program costs for Haiti — roughly $70 million — went to “monitoring the use of donations, informing donors about how their money has been spent, paying skilled staff members to carry out the work, renting secure office space, and ensuring that dollars are leveraged as far as possible.”
But pressed by Grassley’s investigators, the Red Cross could not give an accounting of the oversight it says it did with the money. After repeated requests by Grassley’s investigators over the course of months, the Red Cross finally last month produced a document with a narrative description of oversight but no financial details.
In general, the Red Cross itself doesn’t know how much money it spent on each project in Haiti because of a “complex, yet inaccurate” accounting system, the report found.
The report echoes confidential findings made by consultants hired by the Red Cross, which were previously reported by ProPublica and NPR. An internal evaluation of one of the group’s water and sanitation projects found there was “no correct process for monitoring project spending.” Another assessment found that the group’s figures on how many people helped in a hygiene project were “fairly meaningless.”
In response to Grassley’s investigation, the Red Cross for the first time posted online a list of specific projects in Haiti. But the accounting on the list, along with other materials provided to Grassley, raises more questions than it answers.
Documents provided by the Red Cross to Grassley show that the charity at times spent large sums of money on management even when it appeared to be simply writing a check to other organizations that were doing actual projects.
In 2010, the Red Cross gave $4.3 million to its sister organization, the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) for disaster preparedness work. On top of the $4.3 million, according to budget figures the charity provided Grassley, the American Red Cross spent another $2 million on its own — to “manage” granting money to another organization.
The IFRC then took out its own overhead and administrative costs before using the money to help Haitians.
When asked why the Red Cross needed $2 million dollars to give money to its sister organization, the group said in its statement the costs were “incurred to ensure accountability, monitoring and evaluation of work performed and ensure our partners meet their contractual requirements.”
The Red Cross added that “Implementing a tracking system by project would take a lot of time and would be a waste of donor dollars that could be better spent on delivering services.”
In 2014, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., of the House Homeland Security Committee asked the Government Accountability Office to examine the Red Cross’ disaster services, in part because of problems in its response to Superstorm Sandy in 2012.
McGovern recently told Grassley’s investigators that the Red Cross “gave [the GAO] everything that they asked for.”
That statement was untrue, according to the report: “This is contrary to the documentary evidence of communications between GAO and [the Red Cross].”
The Red Cross, the committee found, “failed to provide to GAO a substantial volume of requested material.”
The report lists eight examples of things the Red Cross declined to provide to government investigators. They range from descriptions of the charity’s internal oversight processes to interviews with chapter officials involved in the response to Superstorm Sandy.
In its statement to ProPublica and NPR, the group doubled-down on McGovern’s earlier assertion: “At no point did the Red Cross refuse to provide requested information.”
McGovern has publicly portrayed the Red Cross as a beacon of openness. “We made a commitment that we want to lead the effort in transparency," she said at the National Press Club in 2011. But Grassley’s report notes that, as ProPublica revealed last year, McGovern hadtried outright to kill the GAO investigation.
Grassley’s report found that while the Red Cross couldn’t kill the investigation, it “was able to limit the scope of the GAO’s inquiry."
In meetings and email correspondence over the course of several months, Red Cross General Counsel David Meltzer questioned GAO’s legal authority to look at the Red Cross.
The Red Cross argued that investigators’ “requests for internal decision-making, internal oversight, and internal funding allocation are outside of GAO’s authority,” according to a GAO’s account included in Grassley’s report.
The negotiations reached an almost absurd denouement when the American Red Cross — or ARC — presented a hypothetical about why handing out blankets would not be subject to federal oversight
. As Grassley’s report puts it:
In a September 26, 2014 follow up phone call with GAO, ARC elaborated on its position and provided an example to provide additional clarity: if ARC is in the coordination tent with FEMA and a need for blankets is identified, and ARC has blankets to dispense, the implementation of the delivery of the blankets is outside the scope of federal involvement, but the conversation in the tent is within the scope of federal involvement. At the end of the September 26, 2014, conversation, GAO notes of that conversation state that ARC did not want “to open the door to a long, endless GAO review,” particularly on internal oversight.
As Grassley’s report notes, the Red Cross’ congressional charter explicitly gives the GAO the authority to scrutinize the group.
The Red Cross has about 20,000 employees. But its ethics office, which investigates waste, fraud, and abuse, is composed of just three people, according to the Grassley report. That’s down from roughly 65 staffers a decade ago.
One of the three remaining employees, the “compliance coordinator,” does intake of phone calls and does not do investigations. Another, the chief investigator, is based in New York, away from Red Cross headquarters in Washington.
Requests by the head of the unit, Teala Brewer, for more staff have gone unfulfilled by the general counsel, Meltzer, according to the report.
The report concludes that the Office of Investigations, Compliance, and Ethics was left so under-resourced that it is “unable to perform its primary function; namely, to perform investigations, ensure compliance, and maintain ethical standards.”
If you have information about the Red Cross, email justin@propublica.org. To anonymously send documents online, visit the SecureDrop site.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/haiti/article84458967.html#storylink=cpy
- Senate report released this week calls into question how the charity spent money meant for Haiti after the 2010 earthquake
- Report says there are ‘substantial and fundamental concerns’ about the organization
- A full 25 percent of the donated money was spent on fundraising, management, a contingency fund and ‘program costs’
BY JUSTIN ELLIOTT AND LAURA SULLIVAN
ProPublica and NPRA blistering Senate report on the American Red Cross raises fundamental questions about the integrity of the country’s most storied charity and its stewardship of donors’ dollars.
The report, which was released this week by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and contains nearly 300 pages of supporting documents, found:
▪ After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the Red Cross spent tens of millions of dollars more than it has previously acknowledged on internal expenses. The Red Cross told Grassley that the money was largely spent on oversight to make sure the Haiti aid was used properly. But Grassley’s office found that the charity “is unable to provide any financial evidence that oversight activities in fact occurred."
▪ Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern made false statements to Grassley’s office about whether the charity cooperated with congressional investigators.
▪ McGovern and her subordinates have kept the charity’s own internal investigations and ethics unit “severely undermanned and underfunded.” The charity is “reluctant to support the very unit that is designed to police wrongdoing within the organization.”
There are “substantial and fundamental concerns about [the Red Cross] as an organization,” the report concludes.
In an interview about the report, Grassley said that even after a year of back-and-forth with the Red Cross, “we did not get satisfactory answers. It was like pulling teeth.”
Grassley launched his investigation following stories by ProPublica and NPR on Red Cross failures in providing disaster relief, including after the Haiti earthquake. The group raised nearly half a billion dollars after the disaster, more than any other nonprofit. But our reporting found that, for example, an ambitious plan to build housing resulted in just six permanent homes.
Red Cross officials, including McGovern, have repeatedly told the public that the charity retains 9 percent of donations to cover management and administrative costs. But Grassley found that a full 25 percent of donations — or around $125 million — were spent on fundraising and management, a contingency fund, and a vague, catchall category the Red Cross calls “program costs.”
On top of that 25 percent, the Red Cross sent the bulk of the donated money to other nonprofits to do the work on the ground. Those other nonprofits then took their own cuts for overhead costs — as much as 11 percent.
Over a year of written exchanges with Grassley’s staff, the Red Cross repeatedly revised its figures for the same projects.
“The most important thing (from the report) is an unwillingness to level with the people about exactly where the money went,” Grassley said in the interview. “There’s too many questions in regard to how the money was spent in Haiti that it gives me cause to wonder about money being donated for other national disasters.”
“One of the reasons they don’t want to answer the questions is it’s very embarrassing,” Grassley added.
In a statement, the Red Cross said that while it has not yet seen the senator’s report, the charity and McGovern have been transparent, and donors’ money was properly spent. The statement says the costs of the projects are “entirely justifiable given the size and complexity of the Haiti program, the scale of the destruction and the challenging and sometimes dangerous conditions of working in Haiti.”
The Red Cross was created by congressional charter more than a century ago, and receives a range of special benefits from the government.
Here are more details from the report:
On a page recently added to its website, the Red Cross says the so-called program costs for Haiti — roughly $70 million — went to “monitoring the use of donations, informing donors about how their money has been spent, paying skilled staff members to carry out the work, renting secure office space, and ensuring that dollars are leveraged as far as possible.”
But pressed by Grassley’s investigators, the Red Cross could not give an accounting of the oversight it says it did with the money. After repeated requests by Grassley’s investigators over the course of months, the Red Cross finally last month produced a document with a narrative description of oversight but no financial details.
In general, the Red Cross itself doesn’t know how much money it spent on each project in Haiti because of a “complex, yet inaccurate” accounting system, the report found.
The report echoes confidential findings made by consultants hired by the Red Cross, which were previously reported by ProPublica and NPR. An internal evaluation of one of the group’s water and sanitation projects found there was “no correct process for monitoring project spending.” Another assessment found that the group’s figures on how many people helped in a hygiene project were “fairly meaningless.”
In response to Grassley’s investigation, the Red Cross for the first time posted online a list of specific projects in Haiti. But the accounting on the list, along with other materials provided to Grassley, raises more questions than it answers.
Documents provided by the Red Cross to Grassley show that the charity at times spent large sums of money on management even when it appeared to be simply writing a check to other organizations that were doing actual projects.
In 2010, the Red Cross gave $4.3 million to its sister organization, the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) for disaster preparedness work. On top of the $4.3 million, according to budget figures the charity provided Grassley, the American Red Cross spent another $2 million on its own — to “manage” granting money to another organization.
The IFRC then took out its own overhead and administrative costs before using the money to help Haitians.
When asked why the Red Cross needed $2 million dollars to give money to its sister organization, the group said in its statement the costs were “incurred to ensure accountability, monitoring and evaluation of work performed and ensure our partners meet their contractual requirements.”
The Red Cross added that “Implementing a tracking system by project would take a lot of time and would be a waste of donor dollars that could be better spent on delivering services.”
In 2014, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., of the House Homeland Security Committee asked the Government Accountability Office to examine the Red Cross’ disaster services, in part because of problems in its response to Superstorm Sandy in 2012.
McGovern recently told Grassley’s investigators that the Red Cross “gave [the GAO] everything that they asked for.”
That statement was untrue, according to the report: “This is contrary to the documentary evidence of communications between GAO and [the Red Cross].”
The Red Cross, the committee found, “failed to provide to GAO a substantial volume of requested material.”
The report lists eight examples of things the Red Cross declined to provide to government investigators. They range from descriptions of the charity’s internal oversight processes to interviews with chapter officials involved in the response to Superstorm Sandy.
In its statement to ProPublica and NPR, the group doubled-down on McGovern’s earlier assertion: “At no point did the Red Cross refuse to provide requested information.”
McGovern has publicly portrayed the Red Cross as a beacon of openness. “We made a commitment that we want to lead the effort in transparency," she said at the National Press Club in 2011. But Grassley’s report notes that, as ProPublica revealed last year, McGovern hadtried outright to kill the GAO investigation.
Grassley’s report found that while the Red Cross couldn’t kill the investigation, it “was able to limit the scope of the GAO’s inquiry."
In meetings and email correspondence over the course of several months, Red Cross General Counsel David Meltzer questioned GAO’s legal authority to look at the Red Cross.
The Red Cross argued that investigators’ “requests for internal decision-making, internal oversight, and internal funding allocation are outside of GAO’s authority,” according to a GAO’s account included in Grassley’s report.
The negotiations reached an almost absurd denouement when the American Red Cross — or ARC — presented a hypothetical about why handing out blankets would not be subject to federal oversight
. As Grassley’s report puts it:
In a September 26, 2014 follow up phone call with GAO, ARC elaborated on its position and provided an example to provide additional clarity: if ARC is in the coordination tent with FEMA and a need for blankets is identified, and ARC has blankets to dispense, the implementation of the delivery of the blankets is outside the scope of federal involvement, but the conversation in the tent is within the scope of federal involvement. At the end of the September 26, 2014, conversation, GAO notes of that conversation state that ARC did not want “to open the door to a long, endless GAO review,” particularly on internal oversight.
As Grassley’s report notes, the Red Cross’ congressional charter explicitly gives the GAO the authority to scrutinize the group.
The Red Cross has about 20,000 employees. But its ethics office, which investigates waste, fraud, and abuse, is composed of just three people, according to the Grassley report. That’s down from roughly 65 staffers a decade ago.
One of the three remaining employees, the “compliance coordinator,” does intake of phone calls and does not do investigations. Another, the chief investigator, is based in New York, away from Red Cross headquarters in Washington.
Requests by the head of the unit, Teala Brewer, for more staff have gone unfulfilled by the general counsel, Meltzer, according to the report.
The report concludes that the Office of Investigations, Compliance, and Ethics was left so under-resourced that it is “unable to perform its primary function; namely, to perform investigations, ensure compliance, and maintain ethical standards.”
If you have information about the Red Cross, email justin@propublica.org. To anonymously send documents online, visit the SecureDrop site.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/haiti/article84458967.html#storylink=cpy
jeudi 6 août 2015
Opinion: Five years after the American Red Cross efforts to rebuild Haiti
Summer investigation raises doubts about post-earthquake relief
By Claire Lazar
OPINION EDITOR
August 6, 2015
Following the January 2010 earthquake that killed over 200,000 Haitians and left more than a million homeless, donations flooded in from governments, financial institutions, and individuals around the world. U.S. households donated a total of more than $1.4 billion, and the American Red Cross raised the most of any charity for the cause: nearly half a billion dollars in the span of a single year.
The aid was intended to do more than just address emergencies. The American Red Cross, well known for its work in disaster relief, came with a big agenda and the good intention to help rebuild Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere. In a January 2011 luncheon in Washington, the organization’s CEO Gail McGovern said that a fifth of the funds raised would “provide tens of thousands of people with permanent homes...where we develop brand-new communities...including water and sanitation.”
Indeed, the American Red Cross was right about the needs of the Haitian people. As an August 2011 Rolling Stone article by Janet Reitman pointed out, “The earthquake didn’t so much destroy Haitian society as it exposed how deeply broken that society already was. In 35 seconds, the quake leveled government ministries and the National Palace, killed an estimated 20 percent of the country’s civil servants, and severely damaged 50 of the nation’s hospitals.” It appears that there was some consensus in the development community that relief in Haiti should have been carried out from the roots, in agreement with the American Red Cross’s ambitious plans. As the Rolling Stone article explained, “American and international officials gave their plan for Haiti a simple and compelling name: Building Back Better.”
But it appears that many of the great intentions that went into rebuilding Haiti have not been seen through. The signs were present as early as August 2011, when Reitman’s article reported that Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince was still buried under 8 million cubic meters of rubble, 680,000 Haitians still lived in temporary camps, and cholera — having spread through poor sanitation and contaminated water — emerged for the first time in the country in decades and infected more than 250,000 people.
Yet in January 2015, five years after the earthquake, the American Red Cross released an update that seemed to paint a promising picture. The document stated that the organization had spent or made commitments to spend all $488 million of donations. “Because of your generosity, people have reopened or launched new businesses and have rebuilt their homes; rubble that used to stretch as far as the eye could see has been removed.” It listed achievements such as 4.2 million people “benefiting from hygiene promotion activities” and 867,000 “benefiting from community health services.”
But a joint investigation by NPR’s Laura Sullivan and ProPublica’s Justin Elliott this June challenged the American Red Cross’s progress in Haiti. It revealed that “the charity built six permanent homes and, according to their own account, no new communities.” Further, it points out that while the organization boasts that it has reached 132,000 Haitians through its housing projects, that number counts people who attended seminars on “proper construction techniques,” received temporary rental assistance, and were housed in temporary shelters that begin to disintegrate within three to five years. In their investigation, Sullivan and Elliott narrowed in on a development project in the neighborhood of Campeche in Haiti’s capital. The multimillion-dollar plan was to feature hundreds of permanent homes, none of which ended up being built. They reported that many residents continue to live without electricity, basic sanitation, or access to drinkable water. According to the investigation, a former official who worked on the project said, “Everything takes four times as long because it would be micromanaged from DC, and they had no development experience.”
Following the release of the joint investigation, NPR correspondent Sullivan wrote, “Without question, it is extremely difficult to build anything in Haiti...But still, in the years since, other charities have managed to do it. Other NGOs have built more than 9,000 permanent homes so far.”
Aside from housing, the investigation by NPR and ProPublica reveals problems in other fronts of the American Red Cross’s efforts in Haiti. For instance, the cholera epidemic prompted the organization to plan the distribution of soap and oral rehydration salts. But the director of the Haiti program wrote in a May 2011 memo that the implementation was hindered by “internal issues that go unaddressed,” and by September, after the death toll passed 6,000, still an internal document listed the project as “very behind schedule.”
All in all, NPR and ProPublica’s investigation argues that “Confidential memos, emails from worried top officers, and accounts of a dozen frustrated and disappointed insiders show the charity has broken promises, squandered donations, and made dubious claims of success.”
Throughout the past two months, Sullivan and Elliott’s work prompted press releases from the American Red Cross, at least one news conference, and calls to action by public officials. Representative Rick Nolan (D-MN) called for a congressional hearing to look into the organization’s alleged mismanagement of funds, and Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) publicly sent the organization a list of 17 detailed and hard-hitting questions. The American Red Cross has since answered them, continuing its pattern to defend its impact in Haiti and oppose allegations.
Throughout the unfolding of events, NPR’s Sullivan and ProPublica’s Elliott have continued reporting. According to Sullivan, Senator Grassley was dissatisfied with some of the American Red Cross’s responses, such as to one question that tried to gauge how much overhead was taken by subcontracted organizations that received third-party funding. The American Red Cross wrote, “Please note that our contracts with the great majority of our partners, while permitting us to disclose this information to Congress, do not permit us to disclose the information to the media or donors.” Yet don’t donors have the greatest stake in understanding the impacts of their dollars, since they selflessly drew pieces of their paychecks that could have been used on themselves, their children, or any other cause that mattered to them?
Unfortunately, hundreds of millions of dollars into the American Red Cross’s Haiti relief efforts, it seems that detailed information may not even be internally available. NPR and ProPublica obtained some of the American Red Cross’s assessments of its own health and water projects, which “found the charity failed in many cases to monitor its own spending, oversee its projects and even know whether the projects were successful. The documents also cast doubt on the accuracy of some of the Red Cross’ public claims of success.” One report looked at the $10 million that the charity gave to other nonprofits to fight cholera. According to Sullivan and Elliott, it found that the organization “did not evaluate any of the work by these other nonprofits, did not seem to know if any of the objectives had been achieved and wasn’t aware that one of the nonprofits mismanaged its funds.”
The ongoing investigation into the American Red Cross’s aid in Haiti does not just raise accountability issues. It also raises accounting issues. While understandably not every miniscule financial detail can be made public, still donors deserve clarity about the projects that their contributions funded. The current exchanges between the American Red Cross, media, and politicians reveal first of all that information is in demand.
In nonprofit institutions in general, such demand should be met. Unlike a for-profit business, where the exchange between customers and providers is direct and reciprocal, a nonprofit takes a payment from one person and provides products or services to another. When donors lack access to financial information about the impacts of their donations, they may be left uninspired — lacking even the satisfaction of knowing that their efforts made a difference. And worse, if the channel that connects them to people in need appears broken, they may lose trust and limit future charitable gestures. The humanitarian values that are meaningful to the donors, such as generosity and empathy, then go unfulfilled. In that way, both ends of the channel end up hurt.
Trust, which is necessary to maintain the flow of charity, is founded in transparency and realized promises. In the case of the American Red Cross, it remains to be seen exactly to what extent the organization succeeded or failed in delivering its promises to both donors and the people of Haiti. While there is little doubt about the good intentions and impressive fundraising efforts of the people in the organization, the investigation by NPR and ProPublica does raise doubt that the projects in Haiti fulfilled their original plans and aspirations. We shouldn’t overlook that tragic possibility, especially when relief in critical times and places can impact not only quality of life but sometimes also health and survival.
http://tech.mit.edu/V135/N18/haiti.html
By Claire Lazar
OPINION EDITOR
August 6, 2015
Following the January 2010 earthquake that killed over 200,000 Haitians and left more than a million homeless, donations flooded in from governments, financial institutions, and individuals around the world. U.S. households donated a total of more than $1.4 billion, and the American Red Cross raised the most of any charity for the cause: nearly half a billion dollars in the span of a single year.
The aid was intended to do more than just address emergencies. The American Red Cross, well known for its work in disaster relief, came with a big agenda and the good intention to help rebuild Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere. In a January 2011 luncheon in Washington, the organization’s CEO Gail McGovern said that a fifth of the funds raised would “provide tens of thousands of people with permanent homes...where we develop brand-new communities...including water and sanitation.”
Indeed, the American Red Cross was right about the needs of the Haitian people. As an August 2011 Rolling Stone article by Janet Reitman pointed out, “The earthquake didn’t so much destroy Haitian society as it exposed how deeply broken that society already was. In 35 seconds, the quake leveled government ministries and the National Palace, killed an estimated 20 percent of the country’s civil servants, and severely damaged 50 of the nation’s hospitals.” It appears that there was some consensus in the development community that relief in Haiti should have been carried out from the roots, in agreement with the American Red Cross’s ambitious plans. As the Rolling Stone article explained, “American and international officials gave their plan for Haiti a simple and compelling name: Building Back Better.”
But it appears that many of the great intentions that went into rebuilding Haiti have not been seen through. The signs were present as early as August 2011, when Reitman’s article reported that Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince was still buried under 8 million cubic meters of rubble, 680,000 Haitians still lived in temporary camps, and cholera — having spread through poor sanitation and contaminated water — emerged for the first time in the country in decades and infected more than 250,000 people.
Yet in January 2015, five years after the earthquake, the American Red Cross released an update that seemed to paint a promising picture. The document stated that the organization had spent or made commitments to spend all $488 million of donations. “Because of your generosity, people have reopened or launched new businesses and have rebuilt their homes; rubble that used to stretch as far as the eye could see has been removed.” It listed achievements such as 4.2 million people “benefiting from hygiene promotion activities” and 867,000 “benefiting from community health services.”
But a joint investigation by NPR’s Laura Sullivan and ProPublica’s Justin Elliott this June challenged the American Red Cross’s progress in Haiti. It revealed that “the charity built six permanent homes and, according to their own account, no new communities.” Further, it points out that while the organization boasts that it has reached 132,000 Haitians through its housing projects, that number counts people who attended seminars on “proper construction techniques,” received temporary rental assistance, and were housed in temporary shelters that begin to disintegrate within three to five years. In their investigation, Sullivan and Elliott narrowed in on a development project in the neighborhood of Campeche in Haiti’s capital. The multimillion-dollar plan was to feature hundreds of permanent homes, none of which ended up being built. They reported that many residents continue to live without electricity, basic sanitation, or access to drinkable water. According to the investigation, a former official who worked on the project said, “Everything takes four times as long because it would be micromanaged from DC, and they had no development experience.”
Following the release of the joint investigation, NPR correspondent Sullivan wrote, “Without question, it is extremely difficult to build anything in Haiti...But still, in the years since, other charities have managed to do it. Other NGOs have built more than 9,000 permanent homes so far.”
Aside from housing, the investigation by NPR and ProPublica reveals problems in other fronts of the American Red Cross’s efforts in Haiti. For instance, the cholera epidemic prompted the organization to plan the distribution of soap and oral rehydration salts. But the director of the Haiti program wrote in a May 2011 memo that the implementation was hindered by “internal issues that go unaddressed,” and by September, after the death toll passed 6,000, still an internal document listed the project as “very behind schedule.”
All in all, NPR and ProPublica’s investigation argues that “Confidential memos, emails from worried top officers, and accounts of a dozen frustrated and disappointed insiders show the charity has broken promises, squandered donations, and made dubious claims of success.”
Throughout the past two months, Sullivan and Elliott’s work prompted press releases from the American Red Cross, at least one news conference, and calls to action by public officials. Representative Rick Nolan (D-MN) called for a congressional hearing to look into the organization’s alleged mismanagement of funds, and Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) publicly sent the organization a list of 17 detailed and hard-hitting questions. The American Red Cross has since answered them, continuing its pattern to defend its impact in Haiti and oppose allegations.
Throughout the unfolding of events, NPR’s Sullivan and ProPublica’s Elliott have continued reporting. According to Sullivan, Senator Grassley was dissatisfied with some of the American Red Cross’s responses, such as to one question that tried to gauge how much overhead was taken by subcontracted organizations that received third-party funding. The American Red Cross wrote, “Please note that our contracts with the great majority of our partners, while permitting us to disclose this information to Congress, do not permit us to disclose the information to the media or donors.” Yet don’t donors have the greatest stake in understanding the impacts of their dollars, since they selflessly drew pieces of their paychecks that could have been used on themselves, their children, or any other cause that mattered to them?
Unfortunately, hundreds of millions of dollars into the American Red Cross’s Haiti relief efforts, it seems that detailed information may not even be internally available. NPR and ProPublica obtained some of the American Red Cross’s assessments of its own health and water projects, which “found the charity failed in many cases to monitor its own spending, oversee its projects and even know whether the projects were successful. The documents also cast doubt on the accuracy of some of the Red Cross’ public claims of success.” One report looked at the $10 million that the charity gave to other nonprofits to fight cholera. According to Sullivan and Elliott, it found that the organization “did not evaluate any of the work by these other nonprofits, did not seem to know if any of the objectives had been achieved and wasn’t aware that one of the nonprofits mismanaged its funds.”
The ongoing investigation into the American Red Cross’s aid in Haiti does not just raise accountability issues. It also raises accounting issues. While understandably not every miniscule financial detail can be made public, still donors deserve clarity about the projects that their contributions funded. The current exchanges between the American Red Cross, media, and politicians reveal first of all that information is in demand.
In nonprofit institutions in general, such demand should be met. Unlike a for-profit business, where the exchange between customers and providers is direct and reciprocal, a nonprofit takes a payment from one person and provides products or services to another. When donors lack access to financial information about the impacts of their donations, they may be left uninspired — lacking even the satisfaction of knowing that their efforts made a difference. And worse, if the channel that connects them to people in need appears broken, they may lose trust and limit future charitable gestures. The humanitarian values that are meaningful to the donors, such as generosity and empathy, then go unfulfilled. In that way, both ends of the channel end up hurt.
Trust, which is necessary to maintain the flow of charity, is founded in transparency and realized promises. In the case of the American Red Cross, it remains to be seen exactly to what extent the organization succeeded or failed in delivering its promises to both donors and the people of Haiti. While there is little doubt about the good intentions and impressive fundraising efforts of the people in the organization, the investigation by NPR and ProPublica does raise doubt that the projects in Haiti fulfilled their original plans and aspirations. We shouldn’t overlook that tragic possibility, especially when relief in critical times and places can impact not only quality of life but sometimes also health and survival.
http://tech.mit.edu/V135/N18/haiti.html
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