Five days after receiving a report recommending she investigate
a local nonprofit for skimming from employee retirement funds,
Santa Clara County District Attorney Dolores Carr has yet to fully
review the County Office of Education’s work, but she has
anti-corruption lawyers carefully reviewing the matter, she
said.
Five days after receiving a report recommending she investigate a local nonprofit for skimming from employee retirement funds, Santa Clara County District Attorney Dolores Carr has yet to fully review the County Office of Education’s work, but she has anti-corruption lawyers carefully reviewing the matter, she said.
Legal complexities regarding who or what institutions the DA can actually prosecute are some of the considerations Deputy District Attorney Bud Frank with the Government Integrity Unit must weigh.
“We don’t really have anything new to say. We’re still reviewing the report, and it will take some time to review it and determine how to proceed,” DA Spokesperson Amy Cornell said without going into specifics. “We understand the community is interested in this, but we have to fully review everything in the report.”
The county’s 38-page report “found evidence of apparent illegal fiscal practices and misappropriation of funds” by the Mexican American Community Service Agency, County Superintendent Charles Weis wrote in a letter to the District Attorney’s Office and other public agencies Friday. The nonprofit – which ran Gilroy’s only charter school and a charter school in San Jose – secretly did not make about $400,000 in payments to its employees’ retirement accounts and instead used those funds to pay for operational costs, according to the report.
The report did not finger any specific employees at MACSA for the allegedly illegal actions, but both Weis and MACSA interim Chief Executive Officer, Maria de la Garza, said that the two employees responsible for the actions were no longer with the agency. Former Chief Executive Officer Olivia Soza-Mendiola resigned June 30 and former Chief Financial Officer Ben Tan is also no longer employed by MACSA, but neither Weis nor Garza would comment on whether these were the two employees responsible.
Click here to read the previous story.
