Two senior employees of a private consulting firm have been accused of stealing money intended for global HIV work and using it for their personal expenses. The Washington Post report is low on details, but as far as I can tell, they had some kind of small USAID contract and falsified all their invoices. If the allegations are true, these people have stolen from the world’s most vulnerable people and dishonored our profession. If they are guilty, I hope the judge nails them to the wall.
I know that small firms can have trouble with USAID compliance. Tracking the fine details of allowable costs and source and origin codes is not for the faint of heart. But thinking you are coded for regional purchases when really you’re only coded for the host country is not exactly the same as spending HIV money on home renovations and new cars. Proper purchasing and sourcing is a legally binding obligation. It is not in any way okay to ignore the law on that. But you can make a mistake on that kind of thing.
You don’t roll on up to a car dealership to buy a caddy and a Mercedes by mistake.
It’s not a game, and it’s not a victimless crime. You can do a lot of good with a million dollars. You can put about 200 people on HIV drugs for the rest of their lives. You can buy 37 GeneXpert machines to rapidly diagnose Tuberculosis in people living with AIDS.
Or, you know, you can put an addition on your house. Jerks.
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Photo credit: Marylin Shaikh
This abandoned clinic my mom visited wouldn’t mind a few thousand dollars for, say, walls and windows
The punishment, I can only assume, is not severe enough. We have problems with our own international publicity with scandals such as the Secret Service Prostitution incident. How are we unable to govern something that takes so much extremity in order to occur. USAID and AID itself is not easy to throw around and takes a lot of criterium to be met. If they are trying to plead ignorance, we should not fall for that. I like your comment on the Mercedes but even then it’s not the closest analogy. It’s more like saying “You intend to go buy your friend a used Honda and buying yourself a porsche.”