Sunday, May 14, 2023

NY Times says a charity ostensibly about supporting the police raised $89 million and spent most of it on fundraising robocalls and paying themselves

NYT:

About 90 percent of the money the groups raised was simply sent back to their fund-raising contractors, to feed a self-consuming loop where donations went to find more donors to give money to find more donors. They had no significant operations other than fund-raising, and along the way became one of America’s biggest sources of robocalls.

...

It is not clear why the groups plowed so much of what they raised back into more fund-raising calls; compared with other political nonprofits, their fund-raising expenditures were extraordinarily high

...

By minimizing their aid to candidates, the consultants who helped set up the five nonprofits avoided scrutiny from the Federal Election Commission and most state watchdogs, and put their groups under the jurisdiction of a distracted and underfunded regulator, the Internal Revenue Service.