"One of the reasons that they don't want to answer questions is it's very embarrassing," Grassley adds. it gives me cause to wonder about other money being donated for other national disasters." "There's too many questions in regard to how the money was spent in Haiti. "The most important thing is an unwillingness to level with the people exactly where the money went," Grassley says. Those other nonprofits then took their own cuts - as high as 11 percent - for their own expenses. The Red Cross sent the bulk of the remaining donated money to other nonprofits to do the work on the ground. But Grassley's office found that 25 percent of donations sent to Haiti - or nearly $125 million - were spent on fundraising and management, a contingency fund and the catchall category the Red Cross calls "program expenses." The Red Cross, including McGovern, repeatedly has told the public that all but 9 percent of donations spent go to humanitarian programs. Grassley, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in an interview that even after a year of back-and-forth with the Red Cross, "we did not get satisfactory answers - like pulling teeth, it was very difficult." Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, arrives for a committee hearing on Capitol Hill on Feb. The Red Cross has kept the charity's own internal investigations and ethics unit "severely undermanned and underfunded," the report says, and the charity "appears to be reluctant to support the very unit that is designed to police wrongdoing within the organization.".The report, however, says the organization did not provide everything requested, "contrary to Ms. Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern told Grassley's office the charity "gave everything that they asked for" during an earlier review.But Grassley's office found that the charity "is unable to provide any financial evidence that oversight activities in fact occurred." The charity insisted to congressional investigators that $70 million spent on "program expenses" included funds to oversee and evaluate its Haiti programs.The venerated charity raised nearly $500 million after the disaster, more than any other nonprofit, but an ambitious plan to build housing resulted in just six permanent homes, NPR and ProPublica found. The report follows a nearly yearlong investigation by the Iowa Republican and his staff, launched after coverage by NPR and ProPublica of the Red Cross' Haiti response. It concludes "there are substantial and fundamental concerns about as an organization." The report also says the charity's top officials stonewalled congressional investigators and released incomplete information about its Haiti program to the public. This story was reported in partnership between NPR News Investigations and ProPublica, an investigative journalism organization.
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