When Jesus told His parable of the dishonest manager, He may have had the United Citizens Foundation (UCF) in mind when he said, “One who is faithful in very little is also faithful in much, and one who is dishonest in very little is also dishonest in much” (Luke 16:10).

The Las Vegas, Nevada-based nonprofit, which does business as Miracle Minds Therapy, received three separate grants totaling $937,917 from the Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of Justice Programs (OJP) via the Nevada Division of Child and Family Services (DCFS) in 2023, 2024, and 2025. The OJP made more than $4.4 billion in grants and awards during those three years, meaning the UCF grants represented a minuscule 0.021% of all OJP awards for the period.

The purpose of the subawards by DCFS was to “support victim assistance programs” for all students attending Clark County School District, according to an audit report made public August 6 by the DOJ Inspector General (IG). The IGs are the internal government watchdogs tasked with exposing waste, fraud, and abuse in federal spending.

The DOJ IG routinely conducts audits of hundreds of OJP grants during the year, so this particular audit report is a regular product of the internal watchdog. The report reached two basic conclusions: First, “UCF provided behavioral health services to at-risk and vulnerable populations impacted by crime and conducted outreach in Clark County, Nevada. The audit found that all four metrics tested were adequately supported.” That was the good news.

Next came the bad news: The audit report “found unsupported personnel costs, improper cost allocation, retroactive billing, unapplied vendor credits, and undisclosed related-party transactions. Additionally, we found that UCF improperly included rent in its calculation of indirect costs and had provided unallowable expenses as matching costs. In total, we questioned $135,922 in unsupported costs and $229,212 in unallowable costs.”

In other words, more than 39% of the total funds awarded to UCF through NDCFS and from officials in the nation’s capital were of such questionable nature that the IG described them as “unallowable” and recommended they be “remedied.” The DOJ Grants Financial Guide requires a grant recipient who is found to have an expenditure that requires being “remedied” to repay the government the full amount involved and implement multiple management measures to prevent recurrence.

In addition to the unallowable expenses cited by the IG, the audit report also suggested the presence of a potentially serious conflict of interest. “We found that UCF did not have proof of payment for six monthly rent transactions, comprising $21,408 of the total $32,468 in rent costs we tested. These payments were made by a management company owned by UCF’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) under a contract agreement for management services and leasing two community-based centers,” according to the IG.

The report continued, “Although rent was approved in the budget, the contract costs associated with this agreement were neither proposed nor approved in the budget for any of the audited subawards. Prior to the contract agreement, UCF rented the space directly from a leasing company, also owned by the CEO. A Nevada DCFS official stated that they were not aware of either the contract agreement or leasing from a related party.”

When The Washington Stand reached out for comment from UCF, John Wickett, the chief operating officer, presented a much different picture of the situation. “There are some things in there that we think are inaccurate, there are some things we think are accurate, and the things that are accurate don’t tell a complete picture. So we are working on our response to that, and we are going to address all of those issues and get everything resolved.”

Regarding the conflict of interest concern, Wickett said, “We did rent some buildings where the CEO was involved with that, and we did a conflict-of-interest resolution following guidelines provided by the Nevada attorney general. We had a formal outside legal opinion to verify that we had done everything correctly on that. We also did an independent investigation through our grants administrator and myself to ensure that the rent was at below-market value, and we established that it was. And then we disclosed that to DCFS.” The problem was exacerbated by what Wickett termed an absence “of clear guidelines” on how to disclose the information.

Asked if he expected UCF to return some portion of the funds the IG designated as to be Remedied, Wickett replied that he thinks “there will be somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000 to $15,000.”

To put this particular IG report into a broader perspective, even if the three federal tax-funded grants to a Las Vegas nonprofit that together total less than $1 million do result in the return of $364,000 to the federal treasury, the remaining “recommendations” from the watchdog to OJP officials concerning UCF raise doubt that the same problem won’t re-occur in the future.

Those recommendations include ensuring that UCF “establish and implement controls to ensure compliance with DOJ Grants Financial Guide (GFG) requirements,” to ensure that UCF implements “a control to ensure required monthly reconciliations are performed and the accounting system accurately reflects subaward activity,” and that UCF moves to ensure that “conflicts of interest and related-party transactions are properly disclosed.”

In addition, the IG recommendations include ensuring that UCF “establishes and implements adequate controls over time and effort reporting and related payroll charges, such as ensuring timesheets match payroll data,” that UCF complies with GSG “requirements related to crediting discounts, rebates, or allowances received,” and ensure that UCF complies “with award requirements related to program income.”

That such recommendations come from an IG report prompts the question: why didn’t OJP officials review UCF’s previous grant performances before approving the DCFS subawards to the nonprofit for three consecutive years? That such a preventive procedure was not in place for the three grants in the IG report raises the question of whether such procedures are in place for all other funding approved by OJP — and if not, why not?

Extraordinary amounts of tax dollars are lost to waste, fraud, and corruption every year, as described by Craig Eyermann, research fellow at the Independence Institute, an Ontario, California-based libertarian nonprofit:

“Historically speaking, Uncle Sam isn’t very good at managing money. Because the politicians and bureaucrats who run the U.S. government aren’t good at managing money, they’ve opened the door to massive losses through fraud. In 2024, the GAO estimated that from 2018 through 2022, the U.S. government lost between $233 billion and $512 billion dollars per year to fraudsters.

“These are not small amounts of money. In 2015, the federal government’s entire budget deficit for the year was $442 billion. Based on the GAO’s estimates, it’s possible the U.S. government could have balanced its budget that year if it had avoided losses from fraud. Would that even be possible today?

“Unfortunately, no. After 2020’s coronavirus pandemic opened the spending taps, politicians and bureaucrats became addicted to excessive spending. The U.S. government is running budget deficits in the trillions as a result, years after the pandemic crisis ended. In 2026, the CBO projects the U.S. government will run at least $1.85 trillion in the red.”

But maybe Eyermann’s conclusion would change if federal offices like DOJ’s OJP screened all grant and award applicants beforehand to ensure they have demonstrated records of complying with strict accountability and transparency standards.