17
votes
The Open Hand Foundation, founded in part by Jirard Khalil (The Completionist) has been keeping and storing donations for ten years
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- Title
- This Charity Is Lying To You
- Authors
- Karl Jobst
- Duration
- 12:07
- Published
- Nov 13 2023
The fact that Karl confronted Jirard about all this via Skype, and in that call Jirard fully admitted that the money hasn't actually gone towards dementia research (despite his repeated claims stating otherwise in his fundraising streams over the years), and he was supposedly "only" made aware of that in 2022... and yet despite all that, 6 days ago (allegedly after that call with Karl), IndiaLand did another charity marathon event to raise even more money for Open Hand, is pretty damning, IMO.
I saw Karl's video yesterday, it's pretty rancid behaviour.
I have always felt very uncomfortable with these kinds of fundraisers as it just doesn't feel like there's much honesty to it.
Thankfully, most charity gaming marathon livestream events aren't raising money for the non-profit foundations created by the person doing the streaming, like Jirard/IndieLand/OpenHand is. E.g. DesertBusForHope is raising money directly for Child's Play.
So I don't think this particular problem is all that widespread. This is unfortunately just Jirard and his brother being either lying idiots (and severely mismanaging their non-profit), or total fraudster scumfucks.
Oh it's just me being dead suspicious of everyone. I had a colleague raise £2500 over a year a decade or so ago... turns out he paid he rent nicely for a while. Left me really jaded to anything charitable like that alas.
I prefer to throw cash at charities I care for myself. But these are a good idea. I think Humble did the first biggies right?
I'm pretty sure Games Done Quick, and Extra Life predate Humble by quite a few years.
Nice. I didn't realise the background was so extensive.
I game, but I don't really <get> modern gaming and the community that surrounds it. So it's quite cool to see how long that's been going on to be fair.
I watched the video and what really didn't make sense to me is... To what end? Why is the money sitting there? Were they trying to figure out a way to funnel it out? Why only pay yourself a meager $30k or so in a year if you're committing fraud? Why not give away 200k and take a 90k salary or something?
Like, sitting on the funds for a decade doesn't make any sense. It wasn't even invested or anything from what I could tell.
If you watch SomeOrdinaryGamers' video breaking down the financial statements of Open Hand, everyone listed as being employees of the foundation are Jirard's family members, and despite the filings stating they have all worked 0 hours and supposedly taken no wages, the Foundation has also somehow spent over $125k of the charity's money in unspecified "expenses" since 2015.
Ah! Haven't had a moment to watch that one yet. So they are just doing a fraud then.
To give them the benefit of the doubt, those could have been for "legitimate" expenses... and the charity may have been well intentioned but also just severely mismanaged. But given all of Jirard's other lies, I highly doubt it. So yeah, most likely it's just your run-of-the-mill charity fraud, treating the money they've raised over the years like a family rainy-day fund. :(
Yeah, I figured that money could've easily been for securing the celebrity appearances, hotels, etc. but the 'continuing to lie not only after you 'found out'' and 'continuing to lie after you've been directly contacted by someone looking into your financials' is evidence of both doing a fraud and bad at fraud.
Today Karl Jobst released a new video, in which he apparently uncovered more questionable activities around the Open Hand foundation.
In the last decade the Khalils have organised yearly sponsored charity golf tournaments which should have added significant amounts of money to the foundation, but the tax filings don't show that the money was ever received. It looks as if tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars never reached the foundation.
Damn, you know it's getting serious when Karl actually urges people who watch his video to file a complaint with the California AG office. And from a comment in /r/TheCompletionist:
So, at the very least, it sounds like the AG office is finally aware of the potential fraud now, and so will hopefully investigate it further.
SomeOrdinaryGamers' next companion video to Karl's, diving a bit deeper into financial details, has finally been released: The Completionist’s Open Hand Charity Scam Has To Be Investigated...
It sounds like Jamie Lee Curtis is probably going to be pretty angry if/when she hears about all this. If Open Hand gets investigated there is the potential for her private charitable foundation, SYZYGY, to be caught up in that now too. Since SYZYGY has made $125k in donations to Open Hand over the years, but in SYZYGY's filings it has Open Hand listed as being a "Public Charity", when it's not. Open Hand is also another private foundation, and supposedly a private foundation donating to another private foundation actually has tax obligations on those donations, since they must be declared as a taxable expense, not a tax-deductible donation.
p.s. Something not mentioned in the video that I know about from having watched Completionist/SBB a bunch over the years, is that Ruby Guest (Jamie Lee's daughter) actually worked for Jirard for several years as an editor and associate producer. That's how Jamie Lee became involved with Completionist, appearing several times on IndieLand's charity streams, and why she had her foundation donate so much to Open Hand every year. So I imagine they're both going to be pretty angry and disappointed when they learn of this.