American Red Cross May Not Know How It Spent Its Donations

by Gary Snyder

 On the heels of a report to Sen. Charles Grassley about how the American Red Cross spent it money as a result of the Haiti Earthquake in 2010, internal documents newly obtained by ProPublica and NPR call into question whether the Red Cross itself has an accurate accounting of how money was spent.

The report concluded that the Red Cross’ figures on the number of people helped in a hygiene promotion project were “fairly meaningless.” 

The reports, assessments from 2012 of some of the group’s health and water projects, conclude that the charity failed to properly track its own spending, oversee projects, or even know whether or not they were successful.

 As ProPublica detailed in an earlier story, the Red Cross took much of the nearly $500 million donated for Haiti and passed it on to other aid groups, keeping a portion to cover its overhead.

The Red Cross’ oversight of some of those grants – $10 million for cholera projects – was so poor that “at least one partner mismanaged their funds unbeknownst to ARC,” one report says, using the acronym for the American Red Cross. The Red Cross also did not assess whether the cholera projects were effective. “None of the cholera program partner’s work has been evaluated by ARC and ARC doesn’t know for sure if the objectives were achieved.”

The internal assessments lay much of the blame on American Red Cross headquarters in Washington. (ProPublica )

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