BLM Continues to Hide Consulting Billing Scam and Deny Public Transparency on $60 Million of Donations
Executive Summary
- BLM has been hiding the extent of billing of BLM by BLM insiders.
- This is why they have postponed accounting reporting.
Introduction
BLM’s charity story began falling apart in late 2021. To cover up the insider billing of BLM by insider-owned consulting firms, BLM has postponed its accounting reporting.
Our References for This Article
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BLM Stands Firmly Against Transparency
BLM has been actively fighting against transparency. This is explained in the following quotation.
No one appears to have been in charge at Black Lives Matter for months. The address it lists on tax forms is wrong, and the charity’s two board members won’t say who controls its $60 million bankroll, a Washington Examiner investigation has found. – Washington Examiner
This is reinforced by the following quotation.
The Foundation has failed to identify its current leadership or who controls its more than $60 million in assets,[44] leading the Executive Director of the charity assessment organization CharityWatch to describe it as “a giant ghost ship full of treasure drifting… with no captain, no discernible crew, and no clear direction.” – Wikipedia
BLM is not a ghost ship. This is a lie. Entities with $60 million in the bank do not have any leadership. Rather BLM has leadership that is hiding. If no one can be identified who runs BLM (our contention is that it is Cullors), then they don’t have to answer questions about accounting. Something else that is extremely odd, is that BLM has no office. This brings up the question of how many employees BLM has.
The following is an analysis by an expert in charities.
Longtime charity expert Doug White said it’s a red flag that BLM won’t answer basic questions about its finances or leadership structure.
“Sixty million dollars is not chump change,” White said. “What BLM does is of tremendous social importance. That they won’t give an honest or complete or straightforward answer in regards to its leadership is a concern. Not only do they not have an executive director right now, we think, but they also don’t want to tell you how the organization is being run.” – Washington Examiner
The following is an analysis by CharityWatch.
“Given the money involved here, this is really unbelievable,” CharityWatch Executive Director Laurie Styron told the Washington Examiner. “To not know who is in charge of $60+ million collected by the national charity arm of arguably the most prominent social justice movement in the country is the worst transparency issue I have seen in my 18 years as a charity watchdog.” – Washington Examiner
That is quite a statement. A substantial portion of charities has improper things going on in them. If this is the worst example that Laurie Styron has seen in 18 years, this means that BLM is most likely involved in charity fraud.
Yet you won’t hear about this in anything but conservative media. The democratic establishment adopted BLM as their pet project, and now they will do anything they can to hide and distract from BLM’s charity fraud.
Fake BLM Consulting Firm #1: Cullors’ Consulting Firm That Bills BLM For Fake Services
Cullors owns a consulting firm called Janaya and Patrisse Consulting, through which she received payments upward of $20,000 a month in 2019 from Reform LA Jails, a Los Angeles-based jail reform group Cullors used to lead. – Washington Examiner
Why is Cullors’ consulting firm billing BLM? If Cullors will be compensated by BLM, why does she simply not take her compensation in the form of a salary?
Cullors is not the only BLM insider with a faux consulting firm that only has one client — BLM.
However, Cullors lies about how much she receives from BLM in the following quotation.
Khan-Cullors said there’s no connection between the home purchases and her BLM role. To be abundantly clear, as a registered 501c3, BLMGNF cannot and did not commit any organizational resources toward the purchase of my personal property,” Khan-Cullors said in a prepared statement. “Any insinuation or assertion to the contrary is categorically false.”
In a cease-and-desist letter responding to a press release from the policy center, the BLM foundation responded to demand the National Legal and Policy Center remove the “insinuation” that “funds from the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation’s funds have been used, directly or indirectly, to purchase real estate.”
Khan-Cullors said in a prepared statement she has been paid a total of $120,000 from the organization since 2013 for acting as spokesperson and “political education work,” but she has not been paid since 2019.– USA Today
This is reinforced with the following quotation.
Cullors claims that “as a registered 501c3, BLMGNF cannot and did not commit any organizational resources toward the purchase of my personal property,” and that she has only received $120,000 from the organization since 2013 for being a spokesperson and for ‘political education work,’ and that she hasn’t been paid since 2019. As for her other sources of income, Cullors stated that she had two previous book deals including a New York Times best-selling memoir, is a public speaker, owns a gallery, has a deal with YouTube, and teaches at a private liberal arts college in Arizona. – Wikipedia
That is how much Cullors have taken in salary, but that does not include the amount billed to BLM and paid by BLM to Cullors’ consulting firm, which of course she is in control over paying.
Does anyone really believe that Cullors would be a founder of BLM, that BLM would raise over $100 million since 2019, and that Cullors would not see a cent of it? This is obviously another Cullors lie.
Fake BLM Consulting Firm #2: Bowers’ Consulting Firm That Bills BLM For Fake Services
Bowers (who is also the deputy executive director of BLM) runs a consulting firm called Bowers Consulting, which lists BLM as a client on its website. Bowers has served as the treasurer for numerous organizations run by Cullors, including Reform LA Jails and BLM PAC. Bowers also listed his Bowers Consulting email address in BLM’s most recent charity registration submitted to New Mexico identified Bowers as the individual authorized to sign checks on behalf of the charity. – Washington Examiner
Fake BLM Consulting Firm #3: Howard’s Consulting Firm That Bills BLM For Fake Services
BLM board member Raymond Howard used to state on his LinkedIn account that he served as finance and operations manager of New Impact Partners, a Dayton, Ohio-based consulting firm owned by his sister. A website for New Impact Partners also named BLM as one of its clients, but the reference was removed from the site in late January after the Washington Examiner inquired BLM about its relationship with the firm. Howard also deleted the reference to New Impact Partners from his LinkedIn account in late January after being contacted by the Washington Examiner in late January. – Washington Examiner
BLM’s Accounting Reporting Change
Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the charity that serves as the face of the national BLM movement, quietly changed its 12-month accounting cycle to run July through June, giving it until mid-May to report what it did with the millions that flooded into its coffers beginning in the second half of 2020. – Washington Examiner
The implication is further explained in the following quotation.
The move enabled BLM to report a sparse, short-year Form 990 to the IRS that covered its activities during only the first half of 2020, when the entity was entirely dormant as a fiscally sponsored project of the California charity Thousand Currents. It was also the period just before BLM exploded as a cause celeb following George Floyd’s racially charged death.The charity reported to the IRS in August 2020, when it applied for tax-exempt status, that it expected to incur precisely $12,706,366 in “Professional Fees” expenditures in 2020. – The Gazette
How can a charity that barely does more than issue press releases, maintains a website, deals with media inquiries incur nearly 13 million dollars in professional fees? It seems that the BLM founders don’t do much but social media and give interviews. This is explained in the following quotation.
Cullors wanted to get involved with the energy and outrage of the moment, and she joined others in creating a protest group called Justice4Trayvon. She had nonprofit connections but was inexperienced in activism, according to community organizers in California at the time. Keyanna Celina, a longtime organizer, recalls an early meeting that Cullors attended in Los Angeles. “She was not talking logistics, about what we were going to be doing out in the streets,” she says. “She was talking about what people should be hashtagging.”
After arranging a protest in Beverly Hills, Cullors, along with Garza and Tometi, resurfaced the following summer in Ferguson, now branding their effort as Black Lives Matter. Ashley Yates, an activist originally from St. Louis, remembers encountering two of the three there. “No one really was clear on what they were there for. – Intelligencer
This is where we predict is where a very substantial amount of fraud will be found. The BLM game is using consulting firms controlled by insiders to bill BLM the charity as a way of transferring charitable donations into the private bank accounts of BLM insiders.
This makes the following quite seem a bit naive.
“For everyone’s sake, I hope that this change in accounting period was not a strategic move to defer transparency on the status of the $66+ million the charity received from its fiscal sponsor in the fourth quarter of 2020,” Styron said. – Washington Examiner
Let us answer that question for Styron — it was done expressly for this purpose.
The National Legal and Policy Center Letter to The Attorney General of California on BLM
This is the first page of the seven-page letter from the NLPC asking the Attorney General of California to investigate BLM.
The letter asks the AG of California to investigate BLM to determine if BLM should lose its charitable status.
The following quotes from the letter are extremely interesting.
BLMGNF is a social activist nonprofit group that has raised approximately $90 million in charitable contributions and on information and belief currently has $60 million in its treasury. It
has failed to renew its registration and file its financial disclosure report for fiscal year ending December 31, 2020 and was required to file its IRS Form 990 return that was due on November
15, 2021.The total lack of transparency and accountability for such a highly visible and wellfunded organization is alarming and justifiably criticized by Black leaders at the local level. The
many residents and businesses of California who have contributed to BLMGNF (and others who have not but nevertheless effectively subsidize BLMGNF because its income is non-taxable) deserve to have a full investigation of its finances and the imposition of fines and penalties, including possible criminal prosecution.In October 2020, BLMGNF received $66 million from Thousand Currents, a non-profit charity based in San Francisco, CA, that managed its donations as its fiscal sponsor. But BLMGNF has
apparently failed to file its IRS Form 990 for calendar year 2020 which was due November 15, 2021 after it received an extension. And it has failed to file its required annual report in California prompting your office to issue the Delinquency Notice to BLMGNF that it “is not in good standing and is prohibited from engaging in conduct for which registration is required, including soliciting or disbursing charitable funds.” – NLPC
BLM has been run as a piggy bank for BLM founders and other BLM executives, which all have consulting firms with a single client, BLM.
How BLM is Postponing Exposure of the Scandal
“Adequate oversight of the nonprofit sector can’t occur if the public doesn’t have access to timely information,” Styron added. “In the event that any of this $66+ million was mismanaged, every day that goes by makes it less and less likely that any potential mismanagement can be fully reconciled or corrected. Time is of the essence.” – Washington Examiner
Yes, that is the entire point, and that is how charity frauds work.
Alan Dye, a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer who specializes in nonprofit law, told the Washington Examiner that BLM’s move to change its fiscal year was “unusual and irregular,” but he added that it “may not be in violation of IRS rules,” which allow for charities to change accounting period by filing a short-year Form 990. – Washington Examiner
Everything about BLM has been irregular since the organization basically began operations in 2019.
The Interpretation by the States of the Change in BLM’s Reporting Year
As of Tuesday afternoon, BLM is out of compliance in California, Washington, New Jersey, North Carolina, Connecticut, Colorado, Maryland, Maine, and Virginia due to its failure to report its 2020 finances. Scott Walter, the president of the conservative think tank Capital Research Center, said those states won’t well receive BLM’s move to change its fiscal year change.
“This latest discovery about BLMGNF is eyebrow-raising for a group already in apparent disarray,” Walter told the Washington Examiner. “The fiscal year change will likely heighten the concerns of state attorneys general who monitor charities and won’t want to wait till May 2022 (the latest possible filing date under the new fiscal year) to discover what happened to $60-plus million.” – Washington Examiner
Patrisse Cullors and Other BLM Founders Have Been Fleecing BLM With Their Consulting Firms
BLM likely paid a substantial amount in contracting fees in 2020. The charity reported to the IRS in August 2020, when it applied for tax-exempt status, that it expected to incur precisely $12,706,366 in “Professional Fees” expenditures in 2020.
All three key BLM stakeholders that were in control of the charity before Patrisse Cullors resigned in May 2021 were closely tied to or were in direct control of consulting firms that claimed to do business with BLM. – Washington Examiner
Nepotism as Freinds and Family Get in On the Scam
The father of Cullors’s only child, Damon Turner, runs Trap Heals, a California-based art company that used to serve as BLM’s “lead developer of the art & cultural efforts,” according to business records previously reported by the Daily Caller. BLM’s political action committee paid Trap Heals nearly $150,000 to co-produce an election night live stream in November 2020 mired with technical problems that industry experts said should have cost a fraction of the price to produce. – Washington Examiner
This is another common tactic of fraud, where suppliers that don’t do very much are allowed to overbill the charity for services. This is also sometimes referred to as the “friends and family plan.” This is found in the following quotation.
Our Prediction
When these accounting documents have to be filed, it will be shown that substantial and unreasonable fees were charged by the consulting firms controlled by the founders from BLM and that furthermore, virtually nothing was done in return for these fees. This was just a way to move money from the BLM which is registered as a charity to private accounts of BLM insiders.
The BLM founders were newbies, and they were not skilled at hiding their corruption. Patrisse Cullors and the others thought they could siphon off money from BLM, and no one would notice.
This is why the Clintons have been brought in to help them manage the scandal’s blowback and put the BLM house, which amateurs had previously overseen, in order.
When the scandal breaks, it will be a coordinated effort by the BLM founders and the Clintons to call anyone who disagrees with the charity fraud racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, etc.
Conclusion
Patrisse Cullors has stated that all criticism of BLM, including the requirements by states that BLM complies with reporting requirements that apply to all charities, is a racist plot. Cullors has further stated that only conservative media have been covering the corruption at BLM.
The problem with this accusation is that Brightwork Research & Analysis is not conservative media. We often cover corruption, and BLM’s behavior and statements fit into a pattern we have seen many times before. The question is why liberal or Democrat-aligned media has not covered the corruption at BLM.
Bias and Corruption in Democrat Aligned Media
Cullors is right on one point — only conservatives appear to be covering this story. However, that is not an indictment against conservative media, but an indictment against Democrat-aligned media. This is because this story is real.
After throwing their endorsement behind BLM without doing any research into BLM and how it functioned now, is too embarrassed to enlighten its readers as to what is blatant fraud at BLM.
BLM is part of the Clinton universe now. And this means the Clinton universe now remotely controls BLM. BLM will receive even more positive media coverage than it already does and will be even more protected by the Democrat-aligned media. That is no doubt another appealing thing about the partnership with the Clinton universe, in that BLM knows that the Clintons/Obamas have a substantial degree of control over large sections of the media. If the Democrat-aligned media won’t cover the corruption at BLM, they are deceiving their readers and viewers.
How Well Does BLM Know Hillary Clinton?
This video shows Hillary Clinton fighting against a $5 per day minimum wage in Haiti. Does BLM support this also?