The money, more than $13 million, was meant to feed seniors and other vulnerable residents of Orange County, Calif., including the growing population of older Vietnamese Americans scraping by on fixed incomes.
But the leaders of the Viet America Society, a nonprofit, have been accused of using federal pandemic aid to buy expensive homes and fund their own lifestyles instead of delivering meals.
The allegations have ensnared Andrew Do, a longtime member of the Orange County Board of Supervisors who now faces calls to resign and is expected to lose his committee assignments at a meeting on Tuesday.
Officials say that Mr. Do, a Republican who is one of the most influential Vietnamese American politicians in the country, steered lucrative pandemic-related contracts to organizations run by his daughter and his political allies that were ill-suited to feed seniors in Orange County.
F.B.I. agents last month searched at least four properties tied to Mr. Do or the Viet America Society, federal law enforcement officials have confirmed. And Orange County’s government has sued the Viet America Society to try to recoup the millions of dollars that was intended to help vulnerable residents. Charges have not been filed related to the investigation.
Mr. Do did not respond to calls for comment and his spokesman, Chris Wangsaporn, declined to comment on behalf of his office. A lawyer for Viet America Society, Mark Rosen, has insisted that the organization had provided the necessary services and was being unfairly targeted.
As the pandemic scrambled life across the country, the federal government distributed some $745 billion in state and local relief to help struggling Americans and stimulate the beleaguered economy.
In Orange County, Mr. Do and his four board colleagues, each of whom represents more than 600,000 people, divided millions of dollars in direct federal aid to spend in their districts.
Once known nationally as a bastion of conservatism in a largely Democratic state, Orange County has become increasingly diverse in recent decades, ethnically and politically. Asian Americans now comprise nearly 24 percent of the county, while Latino residents are just over one-third of the population, according to Census Bureau estimates. Both major parties see the county, which has 3.1 million people, as a political battleground crucial every two years to determining the balance of power in Congress.
It is a time-honored practice for politicians to dole money to local organizations for district projects, and the idea during the pandemic was that county supervisors best knew the needs of their constituents. However, the entire board appeared to have little oversight over how each member was spending money allotted to their district.
Mr. Do directed nearly all of his allocation to contracts with the Viet America Society, which was incorporated as a nonprofit in 2020. Mr. Do’s daughter, Rhiannon Do, 23, was at different points identified in documentation as the organization’s president or executive director.
County officials explained in a lawsuit that they asked repeatedly for the Viet America Society to provide documentation showing that it had fulfilled the terms of its multiple contracts. In 2020, the county’s first contract with the Viet America Society to provide nutrition gap services required that the group deliver a minimum of 2,500 meals per week, but it did not lay out how much those meals should cost.
The invoices the organization submitted for its work were too broad to comply with the requirements laid out by the federal government. At one point, according to the county’s lawsuit, the Viet America Society said that it had served 20,000 meals per month, but “upon inquiry, spontaneously revised that number to indicate it served 10,000 meals per month,” without including documentation to support the change.
Invoices said the contract money paid for food from Perfume River Restaurant & Lounge, which shared addresses and financial ties to the leaders of the Viet America Society. The lawsuit says that the food and services weren’t actually delivered.
This went on for years, officials allege in the county’s lawsuit, filed in August. (Because Mr. Do’s wife, Cheri Pham, is a judge in Orange County Superior Court, the case has been moved to San Diego.)
The suit accuses leaders of the Viet America Society of spending the funds as if they were not taxpayer dollars, but instead from “their own personal bank accounts.” Mostly, the leaders spent it on real estate, including a home that Ms. Do bought for just over $1 million last year in Orange County, the suit alleges.
The house, a ranch on a cul-de-sac, was one of the places searched by federal law enforcement officers in August, according to the F.B.I. Officials would not confirm the nature of the investigation because they said that they were prohibited by a court-sealing order from commenting further.
Ms. Do did not respond to requests for comment. She has previously denied wrongdoing, including through a lawyer, David Wiechert, who told LAist, the local NPR affiliate, last month that she is “a very honest, law-abiding, hardworking young woman.” Mr. Wiechert did not respond to a call for comment.
Mr. Rosen, a lawyer representing the officers of the Viet America Society, said that his clients had done nothing wrong. He acknowledged that they did not keep detailed records, but said that it was because his clients took on the work in the midst of a chaotic and disorienting time.
“The rush was to get services out to people,” he said. “People forget what it was like.”
Mr. Rosen said that his clients, including Peter Pham, a friend of Mr. Do’s who was president of the organization, did buy property over the last few years, but disputed the county’s allegations that they did so with federal funds.
“My clients did not take a vow of poverty,” he said.
Mr. Rosen said that he did not know how much the Viet America Society’s officers were being paid in salary and could not provide the required nonprofit documentation showing their salaries.
The organization’s initial I.R.S. filing for 2022 listed only Mr. Pham and Ms. Do among the officers and key employees and said that each had worked 40 hours per week. It said that Mr. Pham received $40,000 and Ms. Do, the vice president, received $18,000. An amended filing has removed Ms. Do.
The connections to Ms. Do were first reported last year by LAist, which has been investigating the Viet America Society contracts for months.
Katrina Foley, another Orange County supervisor, said that the county gave spending discretion to supervisors in order to allow them to move quickly on top priorities.
In her case, Ms. Foley, a Democrat, said she decided to focus on grocery cards for low-income residents. She said that her staff delivered the cards themselves to constituents who had housing vouchers and then required recipients to sign forms attesting that they had received the money. Ms. Foley used other federal funds on cities’ public projects, including a skate park and a cafe at a library.
“The dramatic difference between how Supervisor Do concentrated funding all in one organization and how the rest of us did it is problematic,” Ms. Foley said.
She and another Democratic supervisor, Vicente Sarmiento, have called on Mr. Do to resign from the board before his term ends in January. Term limits prevented him from running for re-election. The board chairman, Don Wagner, a Republican, has stopped short of asking Mr. Do to step down, but he proposed the Tuesday motion to remove him from his committee assignments.
“I am, of course, aware of the calls for Supervisor Do to resign from the board and expect him to seriously consider his future on this elected body,” Mr. Wagner said in a statement. “I have the utmost confidence in our legal system and will accept the findings of this investigation and the rulings of the courts.”
Other Republicans have begun distancing themselves from Mr. Do. Representatives Young Kim and Michelle Steel have removed him from their endorsement lists, The Orange County Register reported. And despite Mr. Do’s reputation as a kingmaker in the Vietnamese American community, his own influence may be on the wane; the candidate he endorsed as his replacement, Van Tran, did not qualify for the runoff in November.
Tracy La, the co-founder and executive director of VietRISE, a local organization that represents immigrants from Vietnam and other countries, said that all of Mr. Do’s dealings should be examined, potentially including his time as a councilman in Garden Grove, a small city that encompasses much of the county’s Little Saigon area.
VietRISE, a progressive organization, has demanded that Mr. Do resign. Ms. La said that the county must adopt ethics reforms to prevent the kind of corruption that Mr. Do has been accused of.
“He has really embarrassed and betrayed the Vietnamese community,” she said.
The post Orange County Leader Faces Scrutiny Over Charity’s Pandemic Spending appeared first on New York Times.
