Grassley has said volunteers may have committed criminal fraud. The accusations include improperly diverting relief supplies and violating Red Cross rules by using felons as volunteers. Grassley has threatened to rewrite or revoke the organization's charter if it does not overhaul its operations. In a statement yesterday, Grassley said he hopes the group will conduct a top-to-bottom review of its leadership, oversight, and openness.
Especially worrying, Grassley said, was what he called the Red Cross's failure to take seriously the concerns of volunteers reporting the thefts ''until I drew attention to them."
''The Red Cross needs to change its mind-set so it addresses volunteers' concerns swiftly and appropriately, regardless of whether a Senate committee chairman is asking questions," he said.
The New York Times reported yesterday that more than a dozen Red Cross volunteers described an organization that had few cost controls, little oversight of its inventory, and no system of basic background checks for its volunteers. The volunteers said that there was little direct evidence of criminal activity but that the magnitude of the missing goods had convinced them that the operations were being manipulated for private gain. In one case, a kitchen manager swapped 300 prepared meals for parking spaces for Red Cross emergency response vehicles without creating any record of the transaction.
The Red Cross had 235,000 volunteers working in the Katrina disaster area. The sheer number collapsed the normal vetting process, the volunteers said.
