NonprofitEye

This in from the AP: A Bangor, Maine woman is in jail on a felony theft charge for embezzling $60,000 (maybe more) from a nonprofit that assists families with foster and adopted children. Police arrested Katherine Ratliff, 39, after workers at Adoptive & Foster Families of Maine discovered discrepancies in the organizations accounts. From a post on Deal W. Hudson's blog : 85 percent of Roman Catholic dioceses that responded had discovered embezzlement of church money in the last five years, with 11 percent reporting that more than $500,000 had been stolen. Related Nonprofit Eye post: 2006 Nonprofit Hall of Shame Technorati Tags: Charity , Fraud , Fraud Detection , Hall of Shame , Nonprofit

We've talked about the scary repercussions of trying to reach unrealistically high performance measures before.... I just came across an article that's apparently been around since 2003, How I Cooked the Books and Why . Written under the pseudonym "Phil Anthrop" (which is funny by itself), Phil tells the harrowing tale of good values going horribly wrong. I highly recommend this article to anyone managing nonprofit service contracts. Maybe when our funders ask us to meet some unreasonable metrics we should all just quote Nancy Reagan and "just say no." After all the same contracts require compliance with the Drug Free Workplace Act (product from the same administration). The article comes from a back issue of the Nonprofit Quarterly (which I am obliged to plug once again). Please be assured that no payment has been received for this nod (and I have no financial interest, etc)! I just love and admire that rag. Further reading from the " Eye ": ...

You've heard of SOP-98-2 right?   SOP is acronym for "Statement of Position". Today we're talking about SOP-98-2 or " Accounting for Costs of Activities of Not-for-Profit Organizations...that include Fund-Raising ." SOP-98-2 has been effective since December 15, 1998 and applies to all fundraising activities of NPO's and to state and local government entities although most nonprofit managers haven't heard of it, we've been subject to this rule for over a decade. "Accountability" "Misleading the Public" "How much of your donation goes to the cause". These topics have receive a lot of media play. Your donors want to know "if I make a one dollar donation, how much will go the cause?  Typically the answer is 75 to 85%. Most folks would be okay with knowing that 80 cents of your buck go to the cause, yes. But what about the cost of fundraising? If you use a professional fundraiser, it's possible tha...

Are nonprofits just sitting ducks? Is it easier to steal from a nonprofit? or is it a limit of imagination...our hearts are in the right place so much so that we can't conceive of someone setting out to take advantage... Still every month (even every week at times), another story of a nonprofit fraud. NOTE : these are not charities who have defrauded the public, but rather charities who have been the victims of fraud. SEPTEMBER 29, 2006 METHUEN, Mass. A Methuen woman faces two dozen felony charges for allegedly stealing from the Children's Glaucoma Foundation . ...45-year-old Karen Sicher stole more than half a million dollars from the Boston-based nonprofit organization.... SEPTEMBER 24, 2006 Elaine Bernard and Carol Dela Torre (launched) Genesis in 1987, eventually turning the Fresno group home and foster-care business into an $8 million annual enterprise caring for neglected, abused and abandoned children...Now the sisters...are accused of using the nonprofit's credit...