For American Quakers, this weekend in Richmond Indiana could be a landmark in U. S. Friends international work.
Or not.
On Sunday, April 26, a Zoomified Financial Update Forum will be conducted by Friends United Meeting, in which a historic announcement could be made.
Here’s the notice, from Shawn McConaughey, Clerk, FUM Finance Committee:
We will address: strengthening financial accountability; improved cash flow management; a revised budget process with clearer reporting; ongoing reconciliation work towards finalizing audits; and the forensic audit of the Africa Ministries Office. We can report on our current fundraising status and new mechanisms designed to report on current individual fields’ financial position.
Normally such reports are not attention-grabbers. But FUM, as those in the know have already heard, is in very tough financial straits. They laid off one employee late last fall, shuttered Quaker Life, their longtime magazine, and said there was more belt-tightening to come.
The stiffness of the official notice could be put into Quaker plain speak as two brief and blunt queries:
Will FUM sink or swim? (Expected response: “Maybe.”)
Where will the budget axe fall next? (A big hint was dropped unobtrusively in the announcement.)
Two words, one innocuous-seeming phrase:
“Forensic audit.”
What’s that? Here’s the nub of it from the Legal Clarity web dictionary:
A forensic audit goes beyond standard accounting to uncover financial wrongdoing and produce evidence that holds up in court.
A forensic audit is a financial investigation designed to uncover evidence of fraud, embezzlement, or other misconduct, with findings prepared specifically for use in court. . . .
A forensic audit. . . is about investigation. The forensic accountant starts with a specific allegation or suspicion and works backward through the financial records to find out what happened, who was involved, and how much money moved. Where a financial auditor might test a statistical sample of expense reports, a forensic engagement often requires examining every single transaction within the relevant period.
A forensic audit produces a detailed report of findings with documented evidence, calculated losses, and a methodology section that opposing counsel will try to tear apart. The report is built for litigation, not for quarterly filings.
LegalClarity devotes a few more paragraphs to unpacking another plain speech chestnut: forensic audits cost a lot.
The announcement all but declares that FUM strongly suspects there’s been criminal financial misconduct in the Africa Ministries Office.
Not a little bit: a bunch.
It also says they want to get to the bottom of it. (Maybe.)
If they’re serious, when the news reaches Alum Creek Friends Cemetery, in Morrow County, Ohio, a resident Friend there should be turning over in his grave.
Everett Cattell is the Quaker who should be doing a graveyard spin.
Cattell was once about the weightiest member of Eastern Region of the Evangelical Friends Church, based in Canton, Ohio. Born in 1905, he was an evangelical Quaker missionary in India for 21 years, then came home to become Superintendent of Eastern Region, and went from there four miles northwest to Malone University, where he was president until 1972.
Just weeks before his death in March 1981, Cattell published a book, Christian Mission, A Matter of Life (Friends United Press January 1981)
In it he reflected on his missionary career, and closed with some plain, blunt advice for his successors in those fields, and those whose donations paid for them. While his dedication to foreign missions and evangelism was total, he admitted the field was subject to some characteristic problems.
First, Cattell called out the tendency of indigenous church leaders to become more interested in the control of institutions — such as schools and hospitals — than in the people these institutions were built to serve.
But an even more common failing, Cattell said, was “the encroachment of dishonesty through the mishandling of funds by those entrusted with their management.”
Such abuses, he observed sadly, “are found almost universally,” and were “understandable, although not to be condoned.”
His conclusion regarding action when donors learned of such dishonesty was stern: “where there is faulty budgeting, long range planning and auditing” the right response was “No support.”
He added that interested Friends should “insist on adequate information so that
you can pray as intelligently as you are giving.”
Cattell wrote this in 1980, 46 years ago. And even those, whispers of creeping corruption and “mishandling” (plain speak: stealing) donors‘ money from FUM’s eight-decade old missions in East Africa were being widely murmured in FUM’s small circle of mission cognoscenti.
And they have re-echoed, occasionally pretty loudly, ever since. It was not only that funds were being skimmed away from their proper purposes; it was that those who took them soon began quarreling over the ill-gotten proceeds. Physical brawls between factions of Kenyan Friends fighting over the spoils made the news in Kenya several times in the last years of the 20th Century (and now and then since.)
When I started my own Quaker journalistic work in 1981, this persistent story was one of my earliest scoops. (The reports are available online at no charge in the indexed archive of the print version of A Friendly Letter).
Once out in the open, I learned that not few FUM staff had struggled to combat this chronic embezzlement; but it continued. And many other in FUM wider circles were caught in a kind of anxious codependence, along the lines of: “If the folks at home (donors) hear about this, they’ll stop giving; and then some fine dedicated people, (maybe including me), will lose their/our jobs, and then what will we do?”
When I asked officials about it over the years, the most frequent answer was evasion, or a mumbled, “we’re working on it,” then a quick change of subject.
Twenty-six years later, in 2007, I revisited the subject in this blog version of A Friendly Letter, citing a report by keen-eyed New York Friends who had visited Kenya and worked with FUM, and reported back, in part:
Patterns of dependency are still deeply intertwined in the good intentions of North Americans [supporting Kenya missions], who instinctively use money to fix desperate needs, and in the desires of Africans to have outsiders provide the solutions.
These patterns of dependency are compounded by endemic corruption, with Kenya deemed the second most corrupt country in Africa, and Uganda only somewhat better, which makes getting intended resources to desired recipients very difficult. Every single effort of North Americans who are attempting to do useful work in East Africa has to take this systemic corruption into account, or risk being very wasteful of resources.”
From the Report by the New York Yearly Meeting Representatives to the FUM Board Sessions in Kenya, second Month, 2007. (Not online)
In 2011, a followup came in remarkable book by a remarkable Friend: A Peace of Africa by David Zarembka. In its regrettably neglected pages, Zarembka a Harvard educated, independent-minded member of the Sixties generation, described how his life course took him to Kenya. First he went with the Peace Corps, then back and forth on personal missions, and finally, with a Kenyan wife, Gladys Kamonya, to settle.
He joined Friends in the U.S., and stayed with a Friends community in Kenya, living simply and helping organize peace work in the often violent east Africa region. He saw the debilitating chain of dependence from both ends, dealt with many NGOs and Quaker projects. Although he was a liberal Friend, quite different from the evangelical Cattell, his advice to American liberal readers was very similar:
When theft, misuse, wastage, or unacceptable accounting is encountered, the donor must pursue these problems with the same diligence they would use for a similar case in their home country.
Corruption cannot be excused under any rationale. If a donor is not willing and prepared to follow-up such misconduct, it should not accept proposals and disperse funds.
. . . When theft, misuse, or unacceptable accounting is uncov-ered, the donor organization will discretely tell other donor organizations of such problems so that implementing organizations are not able to move from one donor to another with impunity.
In short, fiscal responsibility should be a top priority for anyone sending funds to programs in Africa.
— A Peace of Africa, page 295
David and his wife both tragically died of Covid in early 2021. Now it’s almost twenty years since he wrote. And FUM only a month ago announced the abrupt retirement of its Africa Ministries director, with no successor named.
And that a forensic audit is on the table.
“Almost universally” was Cattell’s lament about the extent of corruption creep. The phrase hangs heavy in the air today, like wildfire smoke. An American observer who seeks to speak honestly of all this corruption while stifling any sense of superiority. We are suffering through a self-inflicted occupation by a gang of major-league kakistocrats, looting billions from our own pockets (and our future) as fast as their tech wizard Crypto-crook henchmen can juice AI to find new ways to steal.
But Cattell and Zarembka didn’t say for Friends to make excuses or cosplay feeling guilty. They said to stop supporting it.
So if FUM is serious about a forensic audit, that forum will bring a landmark turn toward accountability, an all too rare outcome in our homegrown version of the corruption maelstrom.
Even so, there are a few more questions to be asked of FUM’s officials:
- How serious is this audit?
- What will be done to follow up its findings?
- Will its results and course be shared transparently?
- Will FUM apply comparable standards to its other overseas ministries, and domestic projects?
- Is it time finally to conclude, “Enough is enough”? To consider ringing down the curtain on the era of Quaker US “mission” work in Africa, and elsewhere, leaving such projects in local hands, and turning to develop new healthy arrangements outside these timeworn, and perhaps obsolete models?
A closing query to us: Will we be able to recall this First Day forum in Richmond as an “inflection point” turning away where we can from this corruption epidemic? Or forget it as simply another lost opportunity?