I feel like your comment is the most reasonable explanation. The charity sounds like it isn’t actively being run. It is probably a misunderstanding. I can see the charity paying for a group to run the charity, but because their income is very small, they want the charity ran frugally, and are paying the minimum required for management. The management is running the account, making sure taxes are filed, etc, but Jirard thought they were dispersing the funds too. They don’t talk much, other than a quick review at tax season, and the issue is never addressed, because both sides don’t interact enough to see the difference.
This video really frustrated me, because Jobst is claiming things “Fraud” when the evidence he provided looks nothing like that. It isn’t great PR, but nothing so far looks remotely illegal, or even unethical. The internet just loves ragging on a “bad guy,” and are eager to get mad at the bad guy of the day.
Over half a million dollars isn’t “very small” for this type of charity in my opinion.
Not to mention, they seem to admit they’ve known about the issue for a while, but have continued to fund raise and present themselves the charity as if it’s been running along doing good this whole time, but they’ve just been hoarding the money so far.
frezik@midwest.social 7 months ago
The one thing that does lean more towards malice is the quote from the UCSF guy who was fired long before the charity existed.
That said, I otherwise agree. If the IRS forms are right, the money is just sitting there. That’s not illegal in itself. It just looks bad.
Jobst also doesn’t always know US law, since he has a legal background in Australia (and I’m not sure what his specialty was, either).
He particularly mentioned in the video that the IRS isn’t an all-knowing monster ready to pounce on unsuspecting taxpayers, which is true. I’ve seen the bullshit US tax protesters sometimes get away with. Irwin Schiff, for example, once signed a blank 1040 form and sent it into the IRS. He almost made it to the statue of limitations until he went on The Tomorrow Show (a nationwide NBC talk show) and bragged about it. That said, people in the US do tend to think of the IRS as an all-knowing monster ready to pounce on unsuspecting taxpayers, and that’s why the response with the guy came back that way. Jobst doesn’t seem to be fully cognizant of how people in the US view the IRS.
TORFdot0@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Yes, their quoting of the guy who was fired before they filed as a non-profit was very deceptive. And soliciting with the list of other organizations that the money supposedly goes to is as well. It is probable that they donated funds to these places when it was just them raising money for their mom before they decided to organize as a non-profit in 2014 (when Jirard’s YouTube channel started to really gain popularity). The problem lies in that these donations can’t really be proven just based on public filings and so they create the appearance of impropriety if not proving actual impropriety.