Wyclef Jean, who spoke last month at the Hope for Haiti Now telethon for the earthquake relief effort, has a foundation that is receiving some of donations.
American Charged in Haiti Had Some Troubles in Idaho (February 5, 2010) The organization, Yéle Haiti Foundation, whose typical fund-raising efforts in the past brought in tens of thousands of dollars, has reaped more than $2 million from texted-giving alone. It is also eligible for a share of the $70 million raised through the Hope for Haiti Now telethon on MTV last week and stands to raise millions more on Friday, when Mr. Jean appears on a second telethon for earthquake relief, presented by Black Entertainment Television.
But with the money and renown have come a flood of questions — some from former employees — about the charity’s finances, its poor accounting and bookkeeping practices, and more recently, whether it has the capacity to distribute the money it raises. Some critics have also raised questions about payments made to Mr. Jean, 37, who was born in Haiti but left as a boy.
The charity has responded by saying it would create a special account for the donations meant for earthquake relief and Mr. Jean held a tearful news conference on Jan. 18.
“Yéle’s books are open and transparent,” he said, “and we have been given a clean bill of health by an external auditor every year since we started.”
Mr. Jean also said that he had given $1 million to Yéle, though he has offered no documentation of those gifts.
The charity — which says on its Web site that it has created more than 3,000 jobs, put close to 7,000 children in school, and provided more than 8,000 people a month with food, has had trouble making ends meet for most of its 11-year history. In 2007, it ran a $490,000 deficit, which was covered by a loan from a Canadian foundation.
Until recently, Yéle did not maintain basic records required of nonprofit groups. Yéle, which is legally known as the Wyclef Jean Foundation, was not active from 2001 through 2004 and not obligated to file tax forms, according to Hugh Locke, its president.
But when the charity became active again in 2005, it still did not file any tax forms until the state attorney general’s office in Illinois, where Yéle is registered, asked for them. It filed tax forms for 2005, 2006 and 2007 on Aug. 20, 2009 — a move that Charity Navigator, an independent nonprofit evaluator, called odd and “beyond late.”
On Thursday, Yéle provided part of its not-yet-filed 2008 tax form, which showed that it raised $1.9 million that year. It raised an average of $300,000 in the each of the six previous years it filed tax reports.
At the heart of the controversy are large payments the charity made to Mr. Jean and his businesses. In 2006, according to its newly filed tax forms, first reported by the Web site The Smoking Gun, the charity paid $250,000 to a television station controlled by Mr. Jean and his cousin Jerry Duplessis, who also serves on the Yéle board. It also paid a $100,000 fee to a recording studio owned by the two men, for “musical performance services of Wyclef Jean at a benefit concert” in Monaco.
Mr. Locke has said that Yéle paid below-market rates for “hundreds of hours of Yéle programming, over several years, that addressed a wide range of development and social issues in Haiti.” The payments related to Mr. Jean’s performance were to cover the costs of back-up singers, musicians and equipment for the concert in Monaco, he said.
Yéle’s press representative at the Sunshine, Sachs Group in New York, Jesse Derris, said no one from the Yéle leadership would answer questions submitted by The New York Times.
Some groups that have worked with Yéle’s Haitian arm praise it. The World Food Program, which is affiliated with the United Nations, has said it could not function in some parts of Haiti without Mr. Jean’s support, a sentiment echoed by the Pan American Development Foundation, a nonprofit affiliated with the Organization of American States.
ComCel, a Haitian wireless company, also praises Yéle. One of its earliest backers,ComCel continues to give the Haitian arm of the charity several hundred thousand dollars a year for its scholarship program and other educational projects. Brad Horwitz, chief executive of ComCel’s parent company, Trilogy International Partners LLC, said the foundation had learned along the way.
“The money we contribute,” Mr. Horwitz said, “we know where it goes, we know how it gets spent, and an amount that is overhead is negotiated and agreed upon up front.”
But Sanjay Rawal, who served as Yéle’s executive director in 2004 and 2005, said in an interview that he had questions about whether the organization was ready to handle large projects. Mr. Rawal said he resigned because he was frustrated over the lack of a bookkeeper and because board members had charged expenses to the charity that he deemed inappropriate.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/us/05charity.html?scp=3&sq=&st=nyt
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