Berkeley-In last night’s Pacifica National Board meeting, held in executive session, the national board voted to order KPFA to refund to the Pacifica Foundation national office the proceeds of one of two large bequests deposited into KPFA’s Mechanics bank account by then-IED Margy Wilkinson. One of the checks (totaling at least $400,000) was donated to the Pacifica Foundation. In the spring of 2015, the “Hall Trust bequest” was characterized as a restricted gift to KPFA, but information derived from a directors inspection convinced the board of directors the gift was instead left to the Pacifica Foundation and misappropriated for the exclusive use of the Berkeley station. The funds were not deposited into the national Pacifica operating bank account where they belonged. Continue reading KPFA Ordered To Refund Bequest→
Berkeley–Global Village host Derek Rath was the latest long-time staffer to blast KPFK and Pacifica management, saying in a September 8th email that “you are either not thinking straight or you are trying to bring down the station”. Rath’s whole email in which he describes management and the boards as “out of sync with reality” can be read here. Continue reading Not Thinking Straight→
After two wildly differing financial statements were issued by Pacifica in less than a week, a third version has now come out disappearing last week’s inconvenient surplus.
For good measure, the new statement changes the listener support numbers issued on August 17th for every single month from October 2014 to July 2015, sans one, and claims “double-bookings” in 9 of the last 10 months.
Thanks to some detective work, there is an update of sorts on the audit situation.
The payment pulled from KPFA’s bequest fund in July was made to Armanino in the amount of $45,000. Although Pacifica’s lead auditor at Armanino Grant Lam apparently is unaware, Armanino cleared the check.
However the audit has not started. The statement by Grant Lam that no work has been done on the 2014 audit despite it being 60 days past the deadline for both CPB and the Registry of Charitable Trusts at the CA AG Office is correct.
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Pacifica’s fiscal 2014 audit (for the period 10-1-2013 to 9-30-2014) was due to the State of California Registry of Charitable Trusts (which is currently investigating Pacifica for failure to comply with charitable laws) and to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which suspended Pacifica from eligible status for public media funding in June of 2014) was revealed on Tuesday night to have been neither paid for nor started, 11 months after the close of the fiscal year and 56 days after the legal deadline for submission to the State.
Berkeley – Despite receiving over $9.3 million dollars in charitable contributions between October 1, 2014 and May 31, 2015, Pacifica Radio has indicated that it is unable to pay a $55,000 outstanding bill to auditor Armanino LLC in order to meet legal requirements to continue operating as a licensed not for profit organization in the State of California. California’s Nonprofit Integrity Act requires all California charitable corporations with gross revenues of $2 million or more to prepare annual financial statements audited by an independent certified public accountant (CPA). The audited financial statements must be made available for inspection by the Attorney General and the public no later than nine months after the close of the fiscal year covered by the financial statement. Pacifica’s deadline was June 30, 2015. The radio network is in the middle of an investigation launched in December of 2014 by the Registry of Charitable Trusts at the California Attorney General’s office.
Berkeley-“I’m not even thinking about the FY 2014 audit”. Those were the words of Pacifica’s auditor on March 10, 2015 at Pacifica’s audit committee. The audit he is not even thinking about is due to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting on April 17, 2015, so the nails in the coffin on Pacifica’s dwindling chances of being restored to Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding eligibility just got hammered shut. Continue reading The Gagged Auditor→
