Corporate donations to ACORN are vulnerable to misappropriation, dissident group says
By: Kevin Mooney
Commentary Staff Writer
05/25/09 4:39 PM EDT
Donations from financial institutions to the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now during the past several years for community redevelopment are open to misdirection and misappropriation, according to ACORN dissidents. Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Citigroup made grants to the ACORN Housing Corporation and other ACORN affiliate groups. The three banks are also among the top recipients of federal bailout money under the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). ACORN Housing Corporation has received 28 grants totaling almost $3 million since 2005 from Bank of America, according to the conservative Capital Research Center (CRC). The largest Bank of America grant was for $740,000 to a Las Vegas ACORN group. Federal authorities raided ACORN’s Las Vegas office last year on suspicion of voter registration fraud when the group submitted voter registration affidavits with the names of Dallas Cowboys professional football players. Earlier this month, voter registration fraud charges were filed against ACORN in Nevada and in Pennsylvania three days later. ACORN is now under criminal investigation in at least 14 states even as dissidents are raising serious questions about the group’s financial management practices. “Bank of America owes American taxpayers an answer to the following question," said Terrence Scanlon, CRC president. "How can funds be given away to a radical political organization that is under federal investigation and then have the audacity to get in line for TARP funds?" Ernesto Anguilla, a spokesman for Bank of America, said the grants for ACORN Housing were part of a larger effort to address the foreclosure crisis and were set up specifically for home retention and foreclosure mitigation work. JP Morgan Chase has donated over $5 million to ACORN Housing since 1998, while Citigroup contributed $5,000 to an ACORN division in Baltimore for an intern program, according to CRC. JP Morgan Chase refused to discuss its ACORN donations, as did Citicorp. ACORN dissidents, including current and former officers and members, have described what they view as a lack of transparency and accountability by the organization’s leadership, which, they also contend, exercises centralized control over its many affiliates through Citizens Consulting Inc. (CCI), a New Orleans-based non-profit. Bank grants and other donations go to CCI, so it cannot be determined if the funds are being re-directed to other purposes, said Michael McCray, a former national board member from Georgia and a member of the dissident group, the ACORN8. McCray’s assessment is shared by other ACORN 8 members, who have called on Congress to suspend funding for ACORN and its affiliates until an audit is completed and the results made public in congressional hearings. “Citizens Consulting Inc. is the super-secretive financial heart of ACORN,” said Matthew Vadum, a senior analyst and editor with CRC. “Money disappears into it and nobody at ACORN seems to know where it goes. Is it surprising that Dale Rathke, who embezzled $948,000 from the ACORN network, worked for Citizens Consulting? Citizens Consulting was also part of the plot to cover up the embezzlement for eight years. The missing money was disguised as a loan to an officer on the books of Citizens Consulting while the embezzler was quietly transferred to a job at ACORN headquarters. The authorities need to investigate Citizens Consulting as soon as possible.”
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