Wyclef Jean’s Haiti Foundation a Bit Shady?
If you have ever seriously thought abut celebrity charities for even a minute you probably already get what I am about to tell you. Celebrity charities are useless.
Don’t take that the wrong way. Celebrities ENDORSING a charity, and helping to raise money fro a charity are great. They can do much more than the average person to spread awareness, and convince more people to give than most.
What the biggest problem underlying these charities always seems to be is that they WASTE a ton of the the donations on needless expenses. Think about this for a minute. Why does a celebrity need their own charity to fight cancer? They don’t. They can just support an already formed cancer charity for a huge savings in administrative expenses. There are already charities set up for the same purpose. Why do they need another one for the same cause? They DO NOT.
What happens when a celeb stars a charity is that they get some financial benefits themselves for having their name on it. They can funnel money through ti to escape taxes, skim money out of it for extra tax free cash, and in the end piss away almost all of the money taken in to administrative fees.
Wyclef Jean is a prime example of this, and why using established charities already should be the way things are done. Wyclef Jean’s Haiti Foundation has come under scrutiny this week for this very reason. The charity is scamming, and wasting all of the donations it gets. Wyclef is gonna need the best under eye cream soon after someone gives him a black eye.
Undoubtedly, Jean’s celebrity helped draw in donors: He’s an internationally known musician from Haiti who won a Grammy with the Fugees and went on to a hugely successful solo career. But an analysis of the charity’s tax returns raises questions about how it has spent money in the past, with administrative expenses that appear to be higher than comparable charities and payments to businesses owned by the musician and a board member, including $100,000 for a performance by Jean at a 2006 benefit concert.
“It seems clear that a significant amount of the monies that this charity raises go for costs other than providing benefits to Haitians in need,” said Dean Zerbe, national managing director of Alliant Group, a tax services company, and the former tax counsel to the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees charities.
“It brings real caution for donors that want to help in Haiti that they might want to take a harder look at this organization but also consider the significant number of charities that have been doing good work in Haiti that don’t have these question marks,” Zerbe said
