An investigative reporter for the Washington Examiner said he was informed by legal experts that a move by Black Lives Matter to delay disclosing financial information was “highly unusual.”
In a Newsmax segment focused on the BLM organization using an accounting maneuver to put off reporting what had happened to its $60 million bankroll in 2020, Andrew Kerr was asked by host Sean Spicer why an organization would change its accounting cycle. This was an “irregular move,” according to Kerr.
“It gives them about until mid-May to report what exactly they did with all the money that they received in 2020,” Kerr said.
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Kerr said until he received a copy of the organization’s recent 990 tax return this week, “there was no indication that Black Lives Matter had changed its fiscal year.”
By changing its 12-month accounting cycle from July through June, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the charity that serves as the face of the national BLM movement, was allowed to use a short-year 990 tax form. By going from a calendar to a fiscal year, BLM has until mid-May to report what it did with the millions that flooded its coffers beginning in the second half of 2020.
“Experts told me that there’s probably not anything illegal about what they did,” Kerr said. “But still, this comes after years of allegations from local Black Lives Matters groups that the national group — they come in, they take all of the money, they don’t provide any support to local activists.”
These findings come after Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of BLM, announced she was resigning from the group in May amid controversy that she “may have used the charities funds to purchase homes across the country,” Kerr said. Cullors denied that the money came from donations to the foundation.
“Before Black Lives Matter changed its fiscal year, their finances from 2020 were due all the way back in November. So it appears they made this change recently, and it buys them a little bit more time,” Kerr said. “It really begs the question: Why is this group doing everything within its power to delay reporting what it did with all that money?”
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Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, an organization that seeks to bring transparency to how businesses spend money, and Charles Love, host of the Charles Love radio show, also appeared in the segment.
“I don’t think they’re going to get away with doing it again,” Walter said. “As Andrew said, it is very unusual. I have never seen it in decades of studying nonprofits.”
