Charity Update
What can I say? I was wrong. On Sept. 17, 2005, I anticipated a swelling of fraudulent charities to use Hurricane Katrina as a banner for ‘donations’ into personal bank accounts. What I was wrong about was expecting the donations made to legitimate charities would go to the people who need it (or, at the very least, to the massive overhead that these organizations feel they need to function).
Nope, wrong.
More than $200,000 of intended aid money was diverted by 19 Red Cross workers to friends and family. 49 people have had charges brought against them by California Prosecutors and the FBI’s even gotten involved. The temp agency who supplied the Red Cross with these workers, Spherion, said that they didn’t have time to perform background checks on these members of their job pool.
Firstly, if this company can’t perform the background checks on workers going through, who needs them? Isn’t the whole point of a temp agency to provide temporary work that doesn’t have a history that would make the client uneasy? Sounds like those weaselly freaks at Spherion only did half the job. I say they should be charged with defrauding a charitable organization. They billed Red Cross from A and B, yet only did half the job.
Second, what does this say about the management style and coordination within a Red Cross call center? If these 19 workers didn’t have background checks done, it seems safe to assume that they hadn’t worked with Red Cross before. Yet, in the midst of this tragedy, they were able to figure out the Red Cross’s check dispersal process well enough to almost get away with $200,00? And the only reason someone noticed was because the number was so high. They just got greedy, is all. If they stole only $150,000 they might have gotten away scott free. Isn’t one of the first rules of a business that moves money around (like a casino or bank) to “watch the money”??
How many others have gotten away with a few grand here or there? If 19 temp workers got caught for a couple hundred grand, doesn’t’ it stand to reason that there are other leaks in the boat?
mike said,
December 29, 2005 @ 4:53 pm
It’s pennies to ARC. The only thing that hurts them is the bad PR. They were spending $1million/day just to rent the Astrodome from a wealthy conglomorate. They also pay premium rates to cities and businesses to use their buildings as HQs. It’s very easy to spend $4mil, or even $40mil/day in a disaster like that, so the $200k is like an expected “leakage” from the organization. The gov’t bled $2billion/day. That being said, Red Cross did have to take 11,000 donation calls in just a few days, and I can understand if they didn’t have time to run background checks on the workers supplied to them. That’s quite a lot of calls for an NPO. They operate largely on trust. They give each emergency relief worker $850 for 1-2 weeks, and if you need more you just ask your supervisor. You are supposed to use it sparingly, and give back what you don’t use, but I think a lot of people ‘forgot’ to do that.