Massachusetts Audit Finds Not-For-Profit Mental Health Agency Spent $1M on Gifts, ‘Fancy Dinners’

The Center for Health and Development, a not-for-profit mental health agency in Massachusetts, spent $907,000 over a three-year period on "questionable" expenses, including "extravagant dinners and gifts to employees," according to a state audit, the AP/Worcester Telegram & Gazette reports. The agency is largely funded by Massachusetts taxpayers and has received $16.5 million from the state over the past three years. Marc McHugh, a spokesperson for the state auditor's office, said, "[The agency] spent just under a million dollars in what we would have to look at as unauthorized costs and questionable expenditures. If they'd had that million dollars, they could have provided enhanced or better services to their clients." While "nearly all" of the agency's funding comes from the state, seven of the eight members of its board of directors live in other states. According to state auditor A. Joseph DeNucci, the "absentee board" is partly responsible for the misappropriation. DeNucci added the center also was "lax" in monitoring its consultants. The Telegram & Gazette reports the state is also investigating an "unauthorized pay raise" for the center's former director (AP/Worcester Telegram & Gazette, 8/21).

'Chicanery' Harms Salary Reform, Globe Says
While the Center for Health and Development has a "good reputation" for the mental health services it provides, the "signs of chicanery" documented by the state auditor should result in "legal action," an editorial in the Boston Globe states. Noting that the state is working to determine if any "misspent funds are recoverable," the Globe editorial states that such examples of "poor behavior" will adversely impact efforts to raise salaries for "underpaid staffers" who provide services directly to the "human services clients." With the state Legislature considering the creation of a $25 million fund to pay the direct care workers, the Globe writes the "profligate actions" of a "few" should not "interfere" with the ability of the workers to support themselves. Even though the center's director and head of administration and finance began working for the agency after the period covered by the audit, they have criticized the findings as "sensational." Instead of "leveling charges" against the audit, the Globe concludes the Center for Health and Development "should attend to matters of integrity in its own house" (Boston Globe, 8/21).