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-   -   Mexican Non Profit Scams City Out of $500K (http://www.saveourstate.info/showthread.php?t=3029)

Ayatollahgondola 11-16-2010 06:17 AM

Mexican Non Profit Scams City Out of $500K
 
http://www.sacbee.com/2010/11/16/318...er-opened.html


Quote:

The San Jose Mercury News says the Mexican American Community Services Agency, already under criminal investigation for allegedly skimming employee pension funds, could be ordered to refund the redevelopment money.



In fiscal year 2008-2009, the agency got more than $815,000 from the city to fund a variety of community programs. A quarter of the amount was federal funds.

Ayatollahgondola 11-18-2010 11:36 AM

I made requests for info, as is my usual MO, and today I got some back


A PDF file is going top be uploaded later, but here is an excerpt:

Quote:

In April 2009, the first reports were made public revealing that MACSA was in financial distress
and that funds had reportedly been misappropriated. Following the reports, the nonprofit’s
Executive Director and other leaders resigned.

http://www.macsa.org/

Ayatollahgondola 02-16-2013 06:40 AM

http://www.sacbee.com/2013/02/15/519...etirement.html

Two of them pled guilty this week. Their deal is they must cough up some of the money they ...uh...diverted...or they get jail instead of.......now here's the kicker.......community service...:mad:

They steel from the community services agency and the prosecutor agrees to let them off with community service if they pay some of what they stole back. I swear, San Jose is as corrupt as Santa Ana where foreigners are concerned

Quote:

As part of a settlement, former Mexican American Community Services Agency CEO Olivia Soza Mendiola and ex-chief financial officer Benjamin Tan pleaded guilty Friday to grand theft charges and will pay back more than $170,000 they illegally diverted from the organization's retirement funds.

ilbegone 02-16-2013 01:15 PM

Couple of thoughts here:

$170,000 is pretty tough for most people to come up with, particularly in the space of three months.

It seems the jails are crowded and that maybe there is a chance to get back a little bit of something rather than a whole lot of nothing.

Quote:

Under terms of the settlement, if the 56-year-old Mendiola and the 62-year-old Tan pay back the money within three months, they will receive community service instead of a jail sentence.
Otherwise it is a truism that money makes some people more equal than others concerning criminal justice.

MACSA might be chock full of people who pretend to be Mexican and spout all that racist "my people stuff", but it isn't Mexican and former key people of MACSA were involved in misappropriation, not the organization as a whole. MACSA filed suit against the perpetrators.

Here is the third leg to the misappropriation stool - the guy who was fingered along with former CFO Benjamin Tan (likely an oriental sort of a feller) and former CEO Soza Mendiola but slipped through a three year investigation - former COO Xavier Campos.

Here's how it works with people who make their living by stoking racial issues:

Quote:

Miguel Baldoni Olivencia, a former MACSA employee who now teaches in China, says Campos and others treated the nonprofit as a slush fund for development projects while using MACSA’s heritage to buffer criticism.

“The big picture is that Xavier Campos (and people like him) are using race baiting to stay in control of poor Mexicans and immigrants and make themselves rich in the process and steal money from the public trough in the process,” Olivencia wrote in a message.

Examples that Olivencia noted are MACSA’s affordable-housing projects, which are mainly funded by grants and public money. In 2001, MACSA’s board created the Ketzal Community Development Corporation. The people in charge of oversight for both organizations were one in the same. Within six years, MACSA transferred more than $800,000 to Ketzal to build Las Mariposas, a development that helps low-income, first-time homebuyers.

Former MACSA auditor Joe Chaidez—who along with Tan and Soza-Mendiola are defendants in a civil suit filed by MACSA last year—noted in 2008, three years after Las Mariposas was finished, that nearly $600,000 in Ketzal debt should be wiped off the books as uncollectable.
Note the theme of providing home buyers with houses they can't afford with 3/4 of investment lost due to uncollectable debt - isn't that what kicked off the great recession? And further note it was partially by using a portion of other people's earnings without their knowledge, isn't that an underhanded redistribution of income as well as theft?

It seems the misappropriations were noticed due to a common theme in California, it was noticed by employees who take low paying jobs with a promise of payback through retirement that retirement funds were missing - is there another parallel here? Does the way the state of California is being run ring a bell, except that MACSA can't levy taxes?

Quote:

The 35-year-old UC Santa Cruz grad says he’s worked as a substitute teacher in 50 different schools, teaching all subjects and all grades. He says he took a position with MACSA’s San Jose charter school, Academia Calmecac, even though it was “paying well under market,” in part because it had a pension plan that matched employee’s 8 percent of paycheck contributions. “You basically got 16 percent,” Smith says. “That was one of the big plus points of working for MACSA.”

Smith worked there four years, from 2005 to 2009. During that time, he directed about $4,000 a year from his paycheck to his retirement fund, and MACSA deducted the funds from his paycheck. With matching funds, it should reached been around $30,000, he estimates. A colleague from a sister school in Gilroy called and told him, “‘It’s really worth checking.’ I checked it. It was very low. It was way behind.”

According to the DA’s charges against Soza-Mendiola and Tan, MACSA stopped making nearly all employer payments to its pension plan provider (VALIC) in early 2004, began skipping payments to the provider for employee pension contributions in 2007 and stopped all payments completely in January 2008.

“We didn’t want to believe anything bad was happening,” Smith says, “and we didn’t want to risk our jobs by asking questions.”

He remembers the series of meetings when management tried to explain the shortfalls. “At first they said, ‘We don’t know what you are talking about. We were a little behind. Maybe some payments weren’t processed.’ We kept getting a variety of stories. The stories kept getting worse and worse. They’d never cop to anything other than what had been proven,” Smith recalls.
Read the whole article: http://www.sanjoseinside.com/news/en...irement_funds/

Here is what MACSA claims to do: http://www.macsa.org/ourservices.htm

They have a gang prevention / outreach program. Odd if it weren't for the obvious politics their other male programs stress pregnancy prevention while other female programs stress female empowerment.

A lot of the social goals seem worthy if it weren't for the racial emphasis and perceived far left leanings. They seem to hire people of all races and seem to claim that 16% of services go to whites, about 67% to Hispanics, and the rest to other racial descriptions.

They are probably composed of a mixture of people with varying degrees of sincerity, racial identity, leaning left, and a few who are truly delusional.


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