Years of mismanagement may have finally caught up with veterans’ assistance group ForcesUnited, according to former employees.
In fact, several former employees claim the group has not lived up to its mission in years and has been a veteran’s resource in name only.
Currently, the organization’s phone line is manned only by an answering machine, and calls offering donations are not always returned.
The current chairman of the board for ForcesUnited, James Hefner, concedes the group has had some difficulty, including loss of grant funding. The organization is undergoing a reorganization, but he says it is staying focused on helping veterans.
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“We really have to make a decision about the best use for the funds we’ve raised and the programs and services we provide and evaluate all that, and that will be announced once a final decision is made,” Hefner said.
In 2021, the group helped 1,472 clients with housing, 449 clients with utility assistance, 412 clients with employment assistance and 443 clients with education assistance, according to the ForcesUnited website.
Nonprofits are required by law to file Form 990s instead of tax returns. Those forms require nonprofits to provide information about their boards, their volunteers, grants and contributions received, salaries and other financial information.
ForcesUnited Inc. only had filed its Form 990s through 2019, according to its website. However, once questions were posed about the organization’s 2020 and 2021 reports, ForcesUnited added a page to its website with multiple years’ Form 990s. The information included here uses the tax returns on ForcesUnited’s website rather than those on the IRS website.
According to the 2021 tax return, 80% of revenues went to payroll expenses. Hefner says the organization has two employees. Contributions declined from $2.1 million in 2020 to $749,346. Had ForcesUnited not received Paycheck Protection Plan (PPP) loan forgiveness, it would have recorded a loss of $229,000 in 2021.
The Form 990s do not show the percentage of donations that actually go to help veterans.
The tax return shows the group spent $54,000 on IT services, $35,000 on advertising and roughly $108,000 in office expenses. Only $114,000 of the $1 million in expenses went to “Program Services” indicating only 11% of money spent actually goes to servicing veterans.
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However, Blanche Clinefelter, who worked for the group in the mid 2010s, says those numbers would not have been achievable even when the group was bringing in more money than it is now.
“We were instructed to refer all callers to the VA. We were told that wasn’t in the budget to do anything more, and that was before they lost their grant funding,” Clinefelter said.
Clinefelter insists the group lost its grant funding because word began to spread that the organization was not providing the services it claimed and was accused of falsifying documents.
Mary Harrison, interim executive director for CSRA Economic Opportunity Authority, Inc., one of the former grantors, confirmed her group severed ties with ForcesUnited “several years ago,” but did not elaborate further.
“We decided to move those services in-house,” Harrison said.
Vic McGuiness worked for ForcesUnited in 2016 and says he witnessed what he considered would have been fraud. According to McGuiness, ForcesUnited claimed in a grant application that to the Rosalynn Carter Foundation that it had hosted Marriage survivorship seminars for veteran couples. In fact, according to McGuinness, such seminars had never happened. He refused to sign the application, but says someone else did eventually. the group’s then-President and CEO Kim Elle informed him the group was applying for a grant through the Rosalynn Carter Foundation.
According to McGuiness, Elle instructed him to sign a document stating that ForcesUnited provided marriage survivorship seminars for veteran couples even though the group never held such seminars.
“I told them I wasn’t signing because we absolutely had not been doing these seminars and they said, ‘Yeah, but if you don’t sign then we don’t get the money. We don’t get the funding,’ and I told them, ‘Then we don’t get the funding,’” McGuiness said.
Later, McGuiness said someone else signed the document, and the group pushed onward with the grant, even though no seminars were ever advertised or conducted.
ForcesUnited was established in 2007 as the Central Savannah River Area Wounded Warrior Care Project, created by former WRDW television anchor Laurie Ott and businessman Jim Hull. The organization later shortened its name to Augusta Warrior Project.
In 2011, Ott, who was acting director, turned the reins over to Jim Lorraine, who grew the organization from a regional to a national group.
Due to concerns about growth and loss of funding at the local level because of the group’s size, Lorraine agreed to allow the Augusta chapter of what was now called America’s Warrior Project to splinter off into ForcesUnited, and Kim Elle was tapped as the new director.
McGuiness, Clinefelter and fellow former ForcesUnited employee Kelly Knitter agree that the problems with the organization began when Elle took over and started working to sever ties with the parent organization.
“Everything became secretive. Trust was definitely an issue. There was no transparency. It was all about raising funding, not helping veterans,” Knitter said.
McGuiness agrees.
“It was a toxic work environment. There was no real impetus for helping veterans. It was all about how we could engage with the local press,” McGuiness said.
