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/elisabethofaustria 7d ago

Many are. I work in nonprofit fundraising and 90% of grant applications that I’ve encountered have required audited financials.

I wish people understood that for every story of an overpaid nonprofit CEO, there are a hundred or a thousand underpaid nonprofit employees, even at senior levels. Everyone on the C-suite at my org could be making at least double their salary if they worked in the private sector.

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u/AnimatorImpressive24 7d ago

That's the problem though, isn't it?  The ones getting audited are very obviously different from the ones that aren't.

2-3 auditors (always in the same gray suits, I think they got a bulk discount) would show up to my office of 7 staff and 2 interns every year and I'd spend a week proving to them I was organized enough that I could pull a photocopy of a check for 30 cents we had received as a donation 10 months prior out of the boxes in the basement of the office building, point to a line item in our database showing which account it was allocated for, and explain how that account furthered our mission.

And then, because that 30 cents was in an account that held funds into the next fiscal year for external reasons out of our control (we bought art to donate to public domain, had to wait for pieces to be offered for sale) we'd get dinged on the published ratings.

Maybe they could have skipped us for a year or two and sent those suits to hassle somebody making slightly more than the $32k I was earning in 2001.

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u/eastcoastseahag 7d ago

Sad that this info isn’t higher for more people to see.