HealthCare Charities, Inc, also known as The AIMS Project, is an American NGO, founded by the devotees from the Mata Amritanandamayi Center in San Ramon California. Its main purpose is to support the Amrita Institute of Medical Science, which is Amma's hospital located near Kochi in India.
The series of documents report the grants and amounts paid by HCI from 2008 to 2012 to finance Amma's various charitable projects. The amounts donated are on the first page of each pdf, line 13, in the column labelled "current year". The same amount is also on page 10, part IX, line 3, column A. Page 2 usually describes the way that HCI concretely contributed to the projects from April 1 of a year to March 31 of the following year.
Donations? Why not comparing them to the declaration made by the Mata Amritanandamayi Math (MAM) in its Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA)?
Each Indian organization getting donations from foreign countries must fill the FCRA to declare these amounts. The FCRA covers a whole year, from April 1 to March 31, and it is made available online by the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs. The period is the same as HCI's one, so the amounts donated by HCI to MAM should be exactly the same in both FCRA and IRS forms each year.
- Donations reported in HCI IRS 2008-2009 should be declared in MAM FCRA 2008-2009
- Donations reported in HCI IRS 2009-2010 should be declared in MAM FCRA 2009-2010
- Donations reported in HCI IRS 2010-2011 should be declared in MAM FCRA 2010-2011
- Donations reported in HCI IRS 2011-2012 should be declared in MAM FCRA 2011-2012
Yet...
We have checked the numbers over and over again, we don't understand why they are so different, so we would like to share our spreadsheet with you. The amount donated by HCI in 2007-2008 comes from the column "prior year" of the 2008-2009 IRS form. The amount for 2013-2013 comes from the Charity Navigator. Its data related to HCI match the ones that are in the pdf documents so we guess that we can trust their financial informations. We have divided the FCRA amounts by 60 to roughly convert the rupees in dollars, so all amounts are in US dollar.
The chart below gives a clearer overview of the situation. The blue bars stand for the donation given by HCI. The red bars represent the donation received by MAM. Logically the blue and red bars should have more or less the same size each year. But the 3 lonely blue bars are puzzling. The big red bar of 2010-2011 is no less surprising.
In a nutshell, Amma claims that HCI has not donated a single cent to her organization from April 2007 to March 2009. In 2010-2011 she is sure that HCI gave her more than the double of the grants and amount that it has paid.
We can only see two obvious options :
We have checked the numbers over and over again, we don't understand why they are so different, so we would like to share our spreadsheet with you. The amount donated by HCI in 2007-2008 comes from the column "prior year" of the 2008-2009 IRS form. The amount for 2013-2013 comes from the Charity Navigator. Its data related to HCI match the ones that are in the pdf documents so we guess that we can trust their financial informations. We have divided the FCRA amounts by 60 to roughly convert the rupees in dollars, so all amounts are in US dollar.
Year
|
Donation given by HCI | Donation received by MAM | Difference (HCI minus MAM) |
| 2007-2008 | 1,704,194 | 0 | 1,704,194 |
| 2008-2009 | 5,796,663 | 0 | 5,796,663 |
| 2009-2010 | 1,880,555 | 3,763 | 1,876,792 |
| 2010-2011 | 1,087,872 | 2,341,527 | - 1,253,655 |
| 2011_2012 | 2,361,145 | 2,042,926 | 318,219 |
| 2012-2013 | 333,694 | 48,431 | 285,263 |
The chart below gives a clearer overview of the situation. The blue bars stand for the donation given by HCI. The red bars represent the donation received by MAM. Logically the blue and red bars should have more or less the same size each year. But the 3 lonely blue bars are puzzling. The big red bar of 2010-2011 is no less surprising.
 |
| click to enlarge |
We can only see two obvious options :
- either we have made huge mistakes in our spreadsheet. The documents are there, so please correct us if you notice any miscalculation.
- or one of these two organizations is embezzl... oooh! Sooo messy :-)
In fact, it would be helpful to do the same with other countries. There are Amma Centers all over the world. They collect donations from the devotees to suppport the charities. We suppose that they transfer all the money to India. So if you have financial information about your local center, we invite you to compare them to the donations declared in the FCRA. It will help you to make up your mind. Don't hesitate to let us know the conclusions of your individual inquiries.
Update April 2015 : if the FCRA links display an error page then please check out the new process to access them.