Margarita Maldonado of Mecca walks around the Desert Home Mobile Park, also known as “Duroville,” on the Torres-Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indian reservation on April 27, 2005. The neighborhood is a stark example of the poverty that is pervasive across much of Indian Country. / Desert Sun file photo
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THERMAL — Beneath the surface of rampant poverty and joblessness on one of California's poorest American Indian reservations is nearly a decade of mismanagement and misuse of millions in taxpayer dollars meant for those needing the money most, federal and state documents show.
The Torres-Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians, then a tribe of about 200 members, in 2000 created one of the largest taxpayer-funded tribal welfare programs in the United States.
Since its inception, audits show the tribe's Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program has received more than $123 million in federal and state funds. The money is intended to provide cash assistance, job training and family counseling for American Indians in Riverside and Los Angeles counties.
The federal government, however, found that the program potentially “misused” more than $6 million in taxpayer money in fiscal years 2002 and 2003.
Required federal audits of the Torres-Martinez program, each year from 2002 through 2008, also found serious financial accountability problems.
Year after year, how much money the program has on hand, how much it has spent or whether spending followed federal laws and program rules often could not be verified because of the “inaccurate,” “misstated” financial records of the tribal program.
A Desert Sun review of seven years of annual audits for the Torres-Martinez program, as well as thousands of pages of federal, state and tribal documents, found:
• Questionable spending, including purchasing 45 cars for use by 90 employees and then failing to track how the cars were used; and more than $50,000 in undocumented credit card expenditures.
• Missing records and failed procedures to ensure goods were received, services provided and that aid recipients were eligible.
• Repeated violation of federal laws and rules designed to protect taxpayer money.
• The tribe agreed in February 2007 to pay in installments more than $1.5 million in penalties as a result of misuse of welfare funds. However, “as of December 2008 the tribe is not in compliance with the terms of the agreement,” the tribe's auditor stated in September 2009.
• The program's annual funding is based upon an estimated average monthly caseload of more than 5,200 families. But as recently as 2007 the program was serving fewer than 400 families monthly.
“A lot of abuse was happening that shouldn't have been able to happen,” said Ronald Sells, president of The Sells Group, which conducted the Torres-Martinez program's audits from 2002 through 2005.
But as accountability problems persisted and red flags were raised in both Washington and Sacramento, the Torres-Martinez program continued to qualify for full funding.
“The federal government, tribal families and taxpayers in general should be outraged at the degree of mismanagement and waste highlighted in these reports,” said Don Mullinax, a leading forensic government auditor and fraud investigator who reviewed Torres-Martinez program audits at The Desert Sun's request.
Columba Quintero, executive director of the tribal welfare program, characterizes many of the issues as problems of the past. She notes progress in recent audits.
But auditors continued to flag financial accountability problems in the program's most recent audits, including issues cited in 2008 that are unresolved from two years earlier.
“I hate the fact that yes, things have happened,” Quintero said. “But we're working on it. And all I can say is, it takes time.”
She said she expects the program to have “hopefully squeaky clean” audits — by 2012.
The potential misspending by the program, as outlined in the audits, is not just a concern for the taxpayers who provide its funding.
It's money that every year was not maximized to help the poorest of the poor in two counties, including on the Torres-Martinez reservation, which lies on about 40 square miles of checker-boarded parcels from La Quinta to Salton City along the western Salton Sea.
It's a place where unemployment and school dropout levels are historically near 60 percent, packs of wild dogs run among children and courts in recent years have declared living conditions intolerable in some areas.
