WHERE DID THE MONEY GO?
Link: https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.bowdoin.edu/globalnews/docview/2283431525/51187F773215415APQ/1?accountid=9681#
Chuck Grassley is an American politician who is currently serving as the president pro tempore of the United States Senate, and the senior United States senator from Iowa. In 2016, Senator Grassley released a report about the integrity of the Red Cross stating that there are “substantial and fundamental concerns about (the Red Cross) as an organization”. Senator Grassley went back and forth with the Red Cross for a year, and started to see a disconnect between the Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern’s statements to Grassley’s office and the public statements they’ve made in the past. One of these differences was the percentage of donations to cover management and administrative cost. McGovern and other Red Cross officials publicly announced that it was 9% yet Grassley found that “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.” The Red Cross also sent most of the donated money to other nonprofits to do the work on the ground who then took their own cuts for overhead costs.
Grassley states “The most important thing (from the report) is an unwillingness to level with the people about exactly where the money went… 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 natural disasters.” The Red Cross is our country’s most astounding charity. Everyone donates to this charity but this report questions if our money is really going to the victims of natural disasters. The “program costs” 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”. Grassley believes the Red Cross has been a component of disaster response for decades, but that does not put them above Congressional oversight. The public should know how the Red Cross spends both taxpayer dollars and the funds Americans donate. Senator Grassley along with Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi introduced legislation to the American Red Cross Transparency Act which will give the GAO complete access to the Red Cross’ records when needed to conduct oversight. “If the Red Cross refuses to comply, the legislation provides the GAO with the authority to bring an action in court to force compliance.” Grassley’s office believes the charity “is unable to provide any financial evidence that oversight activities in fact occurred.” This will help make the Red Cross more accountable to the public.