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Program sought even further expansion
Despite difficulty spending all of the federal and state cash that was coming in — and mounting problems managing their Los Angeles program — Torres-Martinez officials looked to expand the tribal welfare program even further in 2001 and 2002.
Then-Torres-Martinez Tribal Chairwoman Mary Belardo entered into a $64,000 contract with the program as a “consultant,” auditors stated.
The program's executive director at the time, Virginia Hill, told The Desert Sun that Belardo worked weekends to visit tribes in San Bernardino County in an effort to further grow the Tribal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.
“If we are expanding into a bigger area, of course we're going to be drawing additional funds, and (the tribe) would be getting a bigger cut,” Hill said.
The San Bernardino expansion effort ultimately was unsuccessful. No documentation was provided showing what the program gained for its payments to Belardo, auditors stated in 2003.
Belardo remains an executive assistant of the Torres-Martinez tribal welfare program. Attempts to reach her for comment were unsuccessful.
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The amount of public funding of the Torres-Martinez Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program — an average of more than $15.4 million per year since 2002 — was made possible by the federal and state governments allowing the tribe to also provide service to American Indians in other parts of Riverside County, and to Indians and Alaskan Natives in Los Angeles County, about 130 miles away.
“No one else had ever thought to do it, I guess,” said Virginia Hill, who helped found the program and served as its executive director until resigning under pressure in 2003 amid intense questioning of the program's financial accountability.
To administer the expanded program, The Torres-Martinez Tribal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program has its own floor in an office building on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, and has offices in Commerce, Lancaster and Gardena. Riverside County offices are located in Anza and Hemet in addition to the program's main headquarters in Thermal.
The tribe received a negotiated percentage of tribal welfare expenditures to cover indirect costs, such as overhead and shared facilities.
Tribal officials kept saying, ‘spend money; spend money,'” Hill said. “Because they got to take indirect cost money off the top.”
That, according to Hill, helped explain the tribe's desire to expand the welfare program beyond its reservation boundaries, to other tribes and cities.
The program could roll over unspent federal funds from year to year, but unspent state funds went back to Sacramento, Hill said. That added to the pressure to use the money, she said.
But two years into the program, it served nearly 5,000 fewer clients than was anticipated when its funding was set.
“We couldn't spend it all,” Hill said. “I had to be creative.”
Some of the expenditures revealed in audits and other government documents obtained by The Desert Sun:
• The program prepaid for leased office space anticipating 350 employees serving 5,000 clients. Two years later, however, only 90 employees were serving about 350 clients.
“This means that at the Wilshire location, 15 employees are in 13,500 square feet of prepaid space,” auditors stated.
Columba Quintero, the current executive director of the Torres-Martinez tribal welfare program, said she doesn't know how that could have occurred, because excessive and unnecessary office space would not be allowable under federal regulations.
“There's a whole process for doing that, in terms of square footage,” she said. “And prepayments definitely aren't allowed, period. You cannot prepay anything.”
• The welfare program also paid for an apartment in Los Angeles. Hill told The Desert Sun the apartment was a way to save hotel costs for program officials visiting the Los Angeles office, and was occasionally used as a temporary living space for some new hires.
“Later we were told that one of the TANF site directors was a permanent resident of that space,” the program's auditor stated.
• The tribal program purchased approximately 45 vehicles for use by its 90 employees — a car for every other employee, according to auditors. The numbers were approximate because the program maintained no vehicle logs, auditors said.
“During audit observations at the Los Angeles office, seven of nine vehicles' logs could not be produced, and at the time of examination, three vehicles identified as TANF vehicles were observed that were not on any site's vehicle list,” auditors stated in the 2002 audit.
Asset management is now handled much differently by the program, Quintero said.
“We definitely have to track all of our vehicles,” she said. “The inventory piece — I know that was one of our weaknesses. Now we have a full-blown asset management department, with a professional.”
• The cut off the top that the tribe took from welfare program expenditures was questioned by auditors in 2004.
The Sells Group found that the tribe took $1.7 million in indirect costs from its federal welfare funding, but should only have been entitled to about $426,000.
Tribal officials in their response “strongly disputed” the finding, stating that the higher costs involved overcoming the problems in past welfare program administration, which had required “intense involvement and oversight of the TANF program by members of tribal administration.”
But the financial accountability problems continued. In the next year's audit, auditors stated, “Management did not implement sufficient internal control policies and procedures to ensure that transactions were properly accounted for and recorded and general ledgers were reconciled.”
