Could a criminal background check have prevented the death of a nonprofit?
A recent article posted by Statesman.com, central Texas’ leading online news site, reports on the downfall of a local nonprofit. Family Connections, an organization that helped young children and their parents, had to be shut down last week due to financial problems. According to the article the agency is “hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to the Internal Revenue Service and the bank.” It is still unknown if the money was stolen or just mismanaged. Coincidentally it’s executive director, Louanne Aponte, who was responsible for it’s finances has gone missing. An investigation of this case shows Aponte had provided fraudulent audits to state agencies between 2006 and 2010. She is now being charged with two counts of tampering with a governmental record.
Mike Rush, who was the executive director at that time Aponte was hired, could not remember weather a criminal background check had been run on her or not. He had no idea she had a criminal record and since no red flags were raised she was hired. She performed administrative tasks such as dealing with invoices, billing and nonprofit records, he said.
With Aponte missing it is hard for board members and former employees to piece together years of financial documents. An investigation of Aponte did find a criminal history of financial related incidences. In 1982 she was accused of writing a fraudulent check to a clothing store and was charged with theft by check. She was never arrested for this offense at the time but 2 years later was finally convicted of theft and was sentenced to four years in prison and served four months. Years later Aponte filed for bankruptcy, according to public records.
Although the finger pointing is aimed mostly at Aponte some of it should also fall on Family Connection’s 11-member board of directors. The investigation found some obvious red flags which were not followed up on.
- Aponte was the only person in the agency with access to the nonprofit’s finances. One staff member stated that Aponte kept all financial records on a portable computer drive which she took home every night.
- One former board member said he could never get the financial information he asked for. Aponte would routinely have excuses for not being able to provide a breakdown of expenditures by department.
- Department heads inside the agency never knew what their budget was because Aponte would not give them that information.
Not to mar all of Aponte’s good doings but its hard to ignore her role in the downfall of this valued organization. It’s important that all organizations have some transparency when dealing with finances, especially for nonprofits. I would be curious to know if a criminal background check was run on Aponte. A proper background check could have prevented the death of Family Connections.
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