IAFF: Frankie the Money Guy
Showing us where the moolah goes?
Frank Lima, IAFF secretary treasurer, recently pledged “transparency and accountability through simplicity” which should have you reaching for your wallet right away.
Who doesn’t know that where finances go, the devil is in the details?
The IAFF has always kept the details from the members who are told nothing about the reality of how tens-of-millions of dollars is spent.
Frank’s bold move was to print budget lines in the magazine which tell us nothing about anything.
He couldn’t even add a column with arrows indicating an increase or decrease in funding, maybe even use green or red to denote the change, a profound suggestion, I know.
Many local affiliate budgets contain far more information than his.
Does he not know that the IAFF has an entire section devoted to technical assistance, anaylzing complex municipal budgets and developing reports which inform?
Some one should have told Frank, maybe they would have made a few suggestions to create a useful document.
Frank won’t tell us, the actual members, anything but it turns out the Feds aren’t so easy; he has to tell them much, much more.
But there’s a catch, actually a good one, the Fed information is from the past year, how the money was spent and it tells an interesting story.
It’s useful to have an approximate peer for comparison so I have chosen the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) with 313,000 dues paying members. (The IAFF claims 326,000.)
For Federal labor accounting, expenditures are divided into General Overhead, Union Administration, Representational Activities and Political Activities and Lobbying.
The accounting definition of overhead is “the ongoing business expenses not directly attributed to creating a product or service.”
Entities obviously want a low overhead so that resources can be allocated to, in our case, member services.
AFGE overhead is 13% and the IAFF overhead is 31%, nearly 150% higher.
Administrative expenses are “expenses an organization incurs that are not directly tied to a specific core function.”
AFGE Administrative expense is 12% and the IAFF expense is 17%, nearly 50% higher.
AFGE Representational Activities, the meat if not potatoes of the union, is 23% and the IAFF’s is .05%.
That’s not a typo.
The percentage of the IAFF’s representational activities is surely larger than .05%, they’ve just been stupid and lazy when categorizing costs.
The IAFF leadership is so used to a complete lack of ethical oversight that the idea of proving value would never enter their minds.
A few highlights before digging deeper in the days to come:
- On the income side, the IAFF has $56M in per capita income and $15M in “other receipts.”
- Assets of $41M with $24M cash on hand.
- A $2.1M loan from Truist Bank.
- $8M in “other Liabilities” almost all in salary, leave, pension and severance obligations. Severance alone is $1.1M.
- Vice presidents are paid $131K in salary.
- Harold Schaitberger and Jeff Zack walked away with $739K, and $446K respectively, in final payments, not including pensions.
- Schaitberger’s former assistant, Teresa Valenzuela, who now works for Lima, makes $207K.
- Senior managers make $200K+.
Next up: IAFF Income
Cheers.
