The New York Times again confirms why donating to the American Red Cross for disaster relief, or pretty much any reason, is just as bad an idea as I said it was:

The American Red Cross, the largest recipient of donations after Hurricane Katrina, is investigating wide ranging accusations of impropriety among volunteers after the disaster.

John F. McGuire, the interim president and chief executive of the Red Cross, and Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said some of the actions might have been criminal.

[...] There are no known official estimates of the cash or the value of supplies that might have been misappropriated, but volunteers who have come forward with accusations said the amount was in the millions of dollars. The Red Cross received roughly 60 percent of the $3.6 billion that Americans donated for hurricane relief. Mr. McGuire said the investigation started "a number of weeks ago" and was continuing.

"We're in the middle of this, and we're looking at a range of possible problems," he said, "from issues between a few people that are really nothing other than bad will, to failure to follow good management principles and Red Cross procedures that have caused a lot of waste, to criminal activity."

[...] In interviews over the last two weeks, more than a dozen Red Cross volunteers from around the country described an organization that had virtually no cost controls, little oversight of its inventory and no mechanism for basic background checks on volunteers given substantial responsibility.

Though there was little direct evidence of criminal activity, the volunteers said the magnitude of the missing goods had convinced them that Red Cross operations were being manipulated for private gain.

"I can't find any other reason for what was going on," said Anne Tolmachoff, a volunteer from Louisiana. "Otherwise, it just didn't make any sense."

[...] several volunteers said Red Cross managers in the disaster area had pooh-poohed their concerns and intervened to prevent them from documenting the problems they had encountered.

Willie A. Taylor, a volunteer from Michigan who owns a computer business, said he was part of a team that was asked to use a computer system to track every item from the time it was ordered until it was delivered to the end user.

He said the program revealed that roughly half of the "greenies," the requisition forms used to track supplies as they move through the system, could not be reconciled, meaning the supplies could not be accounted for.

"They asked me to do this," Mr. Taylor said, "we came up with a bulletproof process — and then they squashed it when it showed how big the problem was."

Of course, even though the ARC has had problems either not spending or losing its donations for several years, this time it's all the fault of "a few rotten apples." Sound familiar?