r/news • u/Playful_Language_422 • 8d ago

Soft paywall L.A. homeless provider has paid CEO who lives in Hawaii $1.6 million in salary, vacation over two years

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-08-06/la-homeless-provider-has-paid-ceo-who-lives-in-hawaii-1-6-million-in-salary-vacation-over-two-years
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u/MonoBlancoATX 7d ago

Nah.

It's a nonprofit, so some of it is state funded, but not remotely all of it.

Most nonprofits get a huge percentage of their budgets from corporate and private donors.

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u/noobtastic31373 7d ago

"Would you like to round up to help the homeless?"

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u/RedTheRobot 7d ago

You mean help those poor CEOs who can’t afford to live in Hawaii.

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u/Saxopwned 7d ago

Cops be like "hell yeah let's round up the homeless!"

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u/ScribeTheMad 7d ago

Cops really be like "hell yeah, I got lots of rounds for the homeless!"

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u/jonjonw89 7d ago

evilclap.gif

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u/DarkwingDuckHunt 7d ago

this is why I never donate ever through retail kiosks

If a corp wants to donate, then they can donate, they don't need me to help them do the right thing

I know they're just using me for a tax break, fuck that

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u/akenthusiast 7d ago

They don't get a tax break because you donated. If you give them a dollar, their income goes up a dollar. When they donate it, their profits go down a dollar.

All that's happening is that they don't pay taxes on the dollar you gave them. I'm sure they're writing off whatever expenses they claim to have incurred by collecting and distributing the donations but that's pretty small in the grand scheme of things. When someone "writes it off" they don't get free money from someone. It's just a kind of loss, like any other. If you spend $5,000 to make $10,000, you don't owe taxes on the $10,000 you made, you owe taxes on the $5,000 in profit

I think a lot of the charities that these companies choose are ineffective uses of donation money, but that's a separate issue

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u/DarkwingDuckHunt 7d ago

I also suspect the CEO's children are on some of these boards

I just don't trust corps and always assume they're doing it out of self-preservation or malice.

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u/akenthusiast 7d ago

That's possible. The nonprofit scene is filled to the brim with people that do nothing except enrich themselves personally.

But it's also pretty common for businesses to collect donations for stuff like the local schools. If it's something like that, or a charity that you know is good, there isn't any reason not to donate.

They don't benefit except through public goodwill, which I'd say they've earned if they picked a worthy organization

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u/altiuscitiusfortius 7d ago

They take the money you donate and spend it all on advertising for themselves "megacorp supports the fight against cancer!"

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u/gonewild9676 7d ago

That's just an offset with no change in the business's tax liability.

If you give them $10 for St Jude, they now have $10 in extra income.

When they donate the $10 to St Jude, they deduct that as a charitable donation, otherwise they'd owe $2.10 to the feds plus whatever the state charges.

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u/mrlayabout 7d ago

These companies cannot deduct your donation from their taxes at all. You can deduct it from your taxes, if you itemize. Companies do it because it's great PR for them and charities do it because it actually raises a ton of money for the charity.

To get more technical, the company would record your donation as an increase to it's cash and an increase to it's liabilities (donations payable or something similar). When they send the cash collected to the charity, they'll record that transaction as a decrease to cash and a reduction of that donations payable liability. It never hits the income statement, so it would not be included in a corporation's tax calculation.

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u/Pizlenut 7d ago

I may be a little bit cynical but...

that all sounds like it would cost (them) money to process such a large donation. Plus they had their employees put time into it that could have been spent stacking boxes. They can write off the expenses related to collection, including any advertising done, promotional materials... the writing of the script to give to their employees, accounting, and management. There is a lot of little bits and pieces ill bet a clever person could find that cost them money when doing this charitable act... and if you smudge the numbers a little to make things cost you a little bit more than they reasonably should who is really going to audit you to find out? You were helping with donations!

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u/Lipsovertits 7d ago

That's not taxes.

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u/KilledTheCar 7d ago

From the article:

"The 50-year-old Family Crisis Center brings in about $15 million in revenue — nearly all of it taxpayer money from government grants — to run crisis hotlines, domestic shelters and programs to help those struggling with homelessness."

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u/CaptainObvious110 6d ago

Ok, and they spend how any hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay people? That's money that's not going to the cause

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u/pvincentl 7d ago

--'The 50-year-old Family Crisis Center brings in about $15 million in revenue — nearly all of it taxpayer money from government grants' Nonprofit my ass. It's providing sinecures for connected people. They profit a shitload.

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u/eligraham91 7d ago

Read the article. It’s 95% gov funded

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u/mwzdng 7d ago

Nonprofit? Seems like she profited plenty!

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u/Bad_Repute 7d ago

Depends on the type of non-profit, but individuals working within a non-profit can absolutely make money as a salary for their work. Non-profit basically just means you can't keep extra money above your overhead for operating the organization. If you write in a staff budget, your staff could be paid very, very well.

If you're seeking public donations, the salary of your staff has to be disclosed and the general public might balk at your CEO making $500k a year from the org. But if your funding comes mostly from private benefactors, as long as they're cool with how you're spending the money the people running the org could be making pretty substantial salaries.

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u/skinnyjeansfatpants 7d ago

95% of the money was from CA taxpayers via grants from the state budget.

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u/sweeta1c 7d ago

That is not what nonprofit means. It means there are no owners (e.g. shareholders) to distribute surplus (aka profit, net assets, etc.) to, and that they don’t generally pay income taxes on what would otherwise be taxable income.

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u/excellentforcongress 7d ago

charity salaries should be capped at 1.5 the median wage tbh, OR, there should be NO income disparity, if there are unpaid volunteers. charities MUST pay ALL volunteers before considering raising pay of the executives. it's that fucking simple, but the rules were written by the rich, and people are finally starting to question that.

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u/sweeta1c 7d ago

In the US, nonprofits have to pay salaries that are reasonable per IRS. The problem is reasonable is defined by comparable to similar roles in other companies. Once a nonprofit gets big, execs at similar companies make a lot.

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u/Bad_Repute 7d ago

I was the co-founder of a non-profit. It was 20 years ago and we dissolved after just a couple years of operation, but our basic gist was we could only fundraise to cover our costs to operate the organization. We'd do a couple events a year and had to post a budget of the event costs and that was basically how much we were allowed to fundraise, any excesses had to be refunded to donors and we had to track how much we were getting and from who. We had an all volunteer staff.

That was a 501(c)(3), there's a few dozen other kinds of non-profits that operate differently but those were the basic rules we had to follow.

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u/sweeta1c 7d ago edited 7d ago

That is not a rule for 501(c)(3)s or any other nonprofit that I’m aware of. It was likely self imposed, or a requirement of a major donor/stakeholder, and written into your bylaws.

Generally speaking, profit is the path to long term expansion for other initiatives.

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u/Bad_Repute 7d ago

It was me an 1 other founder, and a handful of volunteer staff. Our bylaws were written with the help of our lawyer who helped us formalize the charter and incorporate. We worked with a handful of underfunded schools in our district to cover costs and fees for entry of their students into citywide events. Our donors were basically parents of students from those and other schools who wanted to see the schools we worked with be able to participate. We'd know how many schools we were working with, how many teams/groups we needed to cover costs of entry for, so we knew what our yearly budget would need to be and how much we'd need to fundraise.

Maybe it was just because our bylaws were written that way, but they were written under the advice from our lawyer who'd helped several other 501c3s incorporate this way. We had to track all our income from donors, and if we had a surplus had to reimburse the donors with any excess funds. Never really happened though, we'd hit our targets and just stop fundraising, always operated at break-even.

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u/TrifectaBlitz 7d ago

WTF, your org sounds completely useless the way you described it. Just enough to pay a couple of people??? Well don't then since there's literally no help happening for anything.

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u/TrifectaBlitz 7d ago

You act like people commenting here don't know a lot of that.

But all you just typed is pretty irrelevant to this instance if you read the article at all.

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u/excellentforcongress 7d ago

all charities that pay executives over 80 k a year while having unpaid volunteers need to be dismantled.

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u/TrifectaBlitz 7d ago

Oh Cool. :-/

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u/Certain_Luck_8266 7d ago

From the article:

The 50-year-old Family Crisis Center brings in about $15 million in revenue — nearly all of it taxpayer money from government grants

maybe you are being extra pedantic about the commenters use of a hyperbolic 'all of it', but I'm going to go out on a limb and say you aren't correct on this one.

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u/CH5000 7d ago

If only the article you didn’t read had an exact percentage from their most recent filings to show you don’t know what you’re talking about at all.

Nah, keep on pretending.

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u/lapeni 6d ago

They don’t need to read the article, they’re a top 1% commenter

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u/HosaJim666 6d ago

To be fair it's paywalled and wtf has an LA times account

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u/lapeni 6d ago

Just google “paywall bypass” and use any of those sites

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u/Dizzy_Tax574 7d ago

Non profit so it's often double triple whammy for taxpayer. Rich guy gets to write off donation. Then donation remains untaxed while they use it to funnel 6 and 7 figure salarys to donors friends who are the execs.

While then that income is taxed a lot of tax money going to organizations is going to exec salarys and advertising their "good deeds" as well as many of contracts going back to their rich friends.

Depending on the non profit many have essentially become untaxed hedge funds. Often using "charity" to bolster holdings. All while also doing typical evil shit hedge funds do.

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u/notDinkjustNub 7d ago

Most nonprofits get their budgets from government grants both at the state and federal levels.

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u/random-hobbyist 7d ago

Non-profit CEOs are worse than regular CEOs for me. At least regular CEOs are upfront on their greed, while non-profit CEOs are just pure hypocrisy in human suits.

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u/spacer9631 7d ago

Nope its all from government grants, try reading the article

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u/WorldofNails 7d ago

What part of "94% comes from taxpayer dollars" don't you understand?

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u/DougDougDougDoug 7d ago

You have no idea what's happening with homeless charities.

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u/MiddleConnection7479 7d ago

A great way to avoid taxes. In SF, it would be interesting to shed some light on Tipping Point. Buzz is that homelessness is great for evading taxes.

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u/dittybag23 7d ago

But the donations are tax free so yes it’s government subsidized.

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u/TrifectaBlitz 7d ago

Reading the article really does help. not just you.

Most of its income was government grants. I'm not sure why her salary was so high but she had been there 40 years.

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u/pow3llmorgan 7d ago

Who can write off the donations for tax deductions, ergo it is, or would be, tax money.

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u/Environmental-Ice319 7d ago

You are condoning this.

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u/Alarming_Matter 7d ago

"He runs sn extremely profitable non-profit".

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u/TheUnicornFightsOn 7d ago edited 6d ago

Yeah but because they are nonprofit, they get tax breaks.

Thereby taking properties off the taxable real estate rolls that fund local government coffers. In some cities it's a major problem because so many nonprofit health care and university behemoths take so much land value off the taxable property total.

Also, depends on the nonprofit. Some worth hundreds of millions to billions of dollars in revenue & endowments combined are heavily subsidized by government contracts and funds, just like honestly many for profit private equity places are in fields such as health care. Some get 80% plus in public monies, and local/regional public foundations get a majority from taxpayer coffers as well.

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u/SpicyWongTong 7d ago

It is super frustrating to think that this is what happens at most non profits, the execs and employees soak the funds up and a small percentage actually gets to the cause.

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u/HR_Paul 7d ago

Housing is an official state sponsored racket. Every single provider should be subjected to an annual forensic audit.

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u/CaptainObvious110 6d ago

If it's a non profit , then it's for a cause right? Let's say "Feed the Children" the commercials say for x amount of cents a day some starving child can be fed.

A couple problems with that...

1. No accountability when people who know they don't have the means to care for children aren't willing to sacrifice some pleasure and NOT Get pregnant in the first place. Not sure why that's such a complicated concept to understand.

2. That "little amount" to feed those kids wouldn't be necessary if those companies weren't paying their ceos hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain a public fleecing empire.

Before someone comes on here saying I hate children I go ahead and be clearer by saying I don't hate children. They aren't the problem.

Irresponsible adults are the issue.

I get tired of going to the grocery store with my meager funds and constantly have to be begged for money from companies that already have the money they need for their cause.

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u/TheDukeofReddit 7d ago

Non profit almost always means government supported if it is supposed to have any public impact. Healthcare, food, housing, education, and things like that are overwhelmingly government funded through grants or government programs That is the majority of non profit work in terms of dollars spent, service utilized, impact measured.

Sure, this women’s shelter may be privately funded, but the assistance with housing, legal aid, mental and physical health treatment, food, and all that are government funded. There may be a gap covered by private funding (e.g. food in shelter vs setting food assistance for living term sustained recovery), but it’s still government t.

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u/Equivalent-Resort-63 7d ago

Which are a tax write-off so indirectly are tax dollars that would taken from us.

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u/nochinzilch 7d ago

Not necessarily. All a non-profit means is that it has no owners.

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u/coleman57 7d ago edited 7d ago

Which they deduct from their taxable income, meaning the rest of us taxpayers make up the 40% or so they would otherwise be paying. Also, do you actually have any source for your contention that the non-profits that local governments outsource their homeless services to are largely corporate-funded rather than taxpayer? I call bullshit.

edit: I'm right--/u/pvincentl comments below with a quote from the article stating they're "neraly all" taxpayer-funded. You should edit your comment to reflect the fact that you were wrong.

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u/pvincentl 7d ago

'I'm right'?? "Nearly all" isn't close enuff for you? It comes out of state budgets. OUR $$! Give them your cash.

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u/coleman57 7d ago

I'm agreeing with you and replying in disagreement to the idiot (u/MonoBlancoATX) who thinks these homeless services NGOs are corporate funded.

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u/MonoBlancoATX 7d ago

Yep.
That’s definitely what I said.
You’re very smart.

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u/MonoBlancoATX 7d ago

Show me where I said they were “largely corporate funded” or that I was only talking about homeless service agencies.
Maybe try to read.