The nation’s lowest-rated veterans charity is run by a lawyer at the Department of Veterans Affairs with a six-figure income.
The National Vietnam Veterans Foundation gave just $122,000 in cash donations to veterans in 2014 despite pulling in $8.5 million, tax records obtained by CNN show.
J. Thomas Burch, the CEO and founder of the National Vietnam Veterans Foundation, sped off in a Rolls Royce when confronted by the network on Monday.
“Mr. Burch! Mr Burch! Mr Burch!” a reporter implored as the vehicle took off down a suburban street in Washington, D.C. The network wanted to know how just 2 percent of all donations to NVVF were funneled to actual Vietnam veterans.
Charity Navigator, one of the most influential charity watchdog organizations in the U.S., gave Mr. Burch’s organization a zero-star rating on a four-star scale.
“You can’t go lower than that,” says Michael Thatcher, Charity Navigator’s CEO. “They don’t have an independent board of directors, they actually don’t even have a comprehensive board of directors — only three members on the board at this point in time and some of them are family. So one can say, is this representative of an independent board? It’s not.
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