Audit reveals questionable expenses at East Vancouver non-profit
Posted November 13, 2015 10:29 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – An East Vancouver non-profit that offers mental health and addictions help to at-risk Aboriginal people is shutting down.
An internal audit of the Hey-way’-noqu’ Healing Circle for Addictions Society on Renfrew and Broadway turned up something fishy with its finances. It revealed hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenses were unaccounted for.
Anna Marie D’Angelo with Vancouver Coastal Health says they’ve now pulled their $1.1-million contract with the centre, which serves 300 people.
“All the clients are going to be transitioned to other services. Also, we’d be helping some of the addiction counsellors in job retention,” she tells us.
“The audit showed serious contract breaches which undermined our trust in the organization’s ability to provide quality service to the clients. That’s why we made this decision,” adds D’Angelo.
In one year alone, $200,000 in funding was used to pay off the personal credit card bills of executive staff.
The audit also revealed a discrepancy in the number of counselling hours the society promised versus the number of hours actually provided.
Coastal Health is now considering forwarding these findings to Vancouver Police.
