Facing setbacks and survivors’ frustrations, Pulse foundation leaders boosted pay with tax credit

ORLANDO, Fla. — Facing scrutiny from survivors of the Pulse massacre over high salaries and a lack of progress in their mission to build a permanent memorial, executives at the onePULSE Foundation last year used a federal aid program to significantly boost their pay.

The foundation used a federal tax refund program, known as the Employee Retention Tax Credit, enacted as part of the CARES Act, to pay staff members tens of thousands of dollars last year, which the organization said was repayment for pay cuts they assumed in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

One of its biggest beneficiaries, Barbara Poma, the nightclub’s owner who launched the foundation after 49 people were killed there in 2016, received $95,080 on top of her $150,000 salary. Poma left her position as executive director for onePULSE in April.

Three other executives who made six-figure salaries during the pandemic also saw roughly 50 percent pay bumps in 2022. The foundation did not provide the 2023 base salaries of its current executives.

Experts say repaying salaries is a legal use of the aid, though some nonprofit watchdogs questioned whether the money could have been better used to support the foundation’s mission, which has recently suffered a series of setbacks, including the split from Poma.

Her run as the executive director of the onePULSE Foundation was publicly scrutinized for years for her ties to the Pulse nightclub property and business, which is still entangled in a lawsuit alleging it failed to protect patrons on the day of the tragedy.

OnePULSE Foundation spokesperson Scott Bowman said the tax credits were properly used to retroactively reimburse lost wages during the pandemic.

“If ever there was a time to provide funding to help businesses and organizations stay afloat and retain its employees, it was during this unprecedented and extremely challenging time,” Bowman said.

But survivors and family members of victims say they’re finding it harder to justify the executive salaries for the onePULSE Foundation when plans to build a permanent memorial have never been more uncertain.

Marissa Delgado, 36, who was 29 when she was shot inside the nightclub multiple times in 2016, said she would have liked to see the foundation’s money go toward building a memorial for the people who didn’t survive and helping families of victims and survivors with medical needs, as well as others in the community affected by gun violence.

She said she struggles with medical payments, including therapy and prescription refills, and is growing more frustrated with what she said is a lack of regard from the foundation for her physical and mental distress brought on by the tragedy.

“I don’t know what they’re getting paid for because it’s not for helping us,” Delgado said.

Pulse survivor Jorshua Hernández Carrión, who turns 30 this month, said all he has gotten from the onePULSE Foundation are emails and seven family days, referring to the annual events for families of victims and survivors paid for by the foundation.

“The foundation is a mystery to me,” he said. “I don’t know what they are going to do, they say they have new plans but they haven’t shown us.”

In its tax forms, the onePULSE Foundation says it aims to “create and support a memorial that opens hearts, a museum that opens minds, educational programs that open eyes and legacy scholarships that open doors.”

According to the foundation’s annual reports, onePULSE began awarding college and vocational scholarships in 2020 and its education program was launched in early 2021. Since then, the foundation has awarded about $1.2 million dollars in scholarships, according to the national organization Candid, a merger of the former nonprofit data trackers GuideStar and Foundation Center.

Over the last nine months, the foundation has suffered a series of setbacks and shortfalls, including its failure to secure the Pulse nightclub property as an asset. And at the beginning of the year, the foundation’s plans to build an architecturally-acclaimed museum and memorial, which never launched out of a conceptual phase, crumbled for being monetarily unfeasible.

Critics of the foundation say the onePULSE Foundation is not following through on its promises while profiting off a tragedy, whereas the foundation and its supporters claim executives are getting paid appropriately in order to build a memorial and museum project, while also providing community education programs and awarding scholarships.

Aid boosts leaders’ salaries

In 2022, the organization received $238,104 in federal tax credits enacted as part of the CARES Act.

Of that total, 80.9% was used to pay top officials.

Most of the remaining tax credits went to pay other staffers not listed in tax filings (nonprofits are only required to disclose the compensation of their highest paid employees) and 0.9% was used for operating expenses.

Poma alone received 39.9% of the tax credits. Another 41% went toward paying back the salaries of other key officials who took salary cuts, including its former chief marketing officer who resigned earlier this year.

As a result, some key officials took home an annual salary of more than $150,000 in 2022. And last year’s IRS filing for the foundation shows Poma received $249,580 in annual income.

The foundation announced Poma was departing from the onePULSE Foundation in April.

Laurie Styron, executive director of the watchdog group CharityWatch, said the apparent lack of progress in achieving onePULSE’s mission raises questions about its use of aid funds to boost the pay of top officials.

“If an organization is languishing, not accomplishing its goals under its existing leadership over a period of many years, I question if using ERTC money to retain those executives is the best use of taxpayer dollars,” she said.

“Even if the funds were used to bring executive salaries back up to pre-pandemic levels, a strong argument can still be made that these executives were being overpaid in the first place given their collective failure to make significant, measurable progress on their mission and purpose.”

Poma was removed from her role as executive director in 2021 but was paid her full executive director’s salary plus $95,080 in ERTC funds in 2022 while focusing on national fundraising efforts in a new role called “keeper of the story.”

In an email to the Orlando Sentinel, Sara Brady, Poma’s spokesperson, said prior to last year Poma took the highest reduction within the organization and she voluntarily kept her salary at the reduced level for an additional six months after all other employees had been paid retroactively.

Salary reductions for most of the foundation’s highest paid officials lasted 14 months ending April 30, 2021, while Poma’s lasted for 20 months through the end of 2021.

Brady added that board members were the ones who decided to use the tax credits to pay employees in order to make their salaries whole. WESH-Channel 2 reported some board members have also left the organization following Poma’s departure.

With pay cuts accounted for, tax documents reviewed by the Orlando Sentinel show Poma and most key officials were getting paid more than $100,000 a year during the coronavirus outbreak—a time when nonprofits, including the onePULSE Foundation, were grappling with negative financial impacts brought on by the pandemic.

Bowman said Paycheck Protection Program funds were used to make payroll for employees earning less than $100,000 for nine pay periods spanning from 2020 to 2021.

All salaries in 2023 have reverted back to their base pay along with a 3% cost of living adjustment, according to the foundation’s spokesperson.

Sabeen Perwaiz Syed, president and CEO of Florida Nonprofit Alliance, said the salaries at the onePULSE Foundation seem fair relative to industry standards and the current employment market.

“The public’s desire for nonprofit staff to work for low pay is not a new issue,” she said in email. “Unfortunately, our workforce shortage means we cannot maintain staff at lower wages…salary competition is the number one reason behind recruitment and retention. Competitive packages and culture is what keeps team members.”

When asked for examples of similar nonprofits paying comparable salaries, the onePULSE Foundation provided the Sentinel recent I.R.S filings for three nonprofits that formed after the wake of a tragedy or in remembrance of a tragedy, including the Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Florida, the Sandy Hook Promise Foundation and the Oklahoma City National Memorial.

Each of those nonprofits operate on a grander scale than the onePULSE Foundation and reported significantly higher end-of-the-year fund balances and assets.

“If the organization is comparing the compensation only based on job title this isn’t a fair comparison since job titles can be assigned to anyone,” Styron said. “The bottom line is that compensation should be determined based on the education, skills and experience necessary to be effective in the job. That is the industry standard.”

Few limits on tax credit uses

Experts say the ERTC program was intended to aid employers in retaining their staff by subsidizing their salaries in the face of steep revenue declines caused by the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic.

They add, once granted, employers have a wide latitude with what they can do with the tax credits, including retroactively reimbursing the salaries of executives. Employers can also revert salaries back to pre-pandemic levels, increase base pay, hire more qualified people or fund or expand programs.

“What’s great about helping nonprofits realize that they’re eligible is that they’re mission-first,” John Souza, co-founder and CEO of ERTC.com. “Helping them means you’re giving back to the community on some socio-economic level.”

The company, headquartered in Tampa with offices in Nashville, Atlanta, Los Angeles and New York, specializes in helping business owners and charities apply for the credits.

“There’s nothing legally that precludes [the onePULSE Foundation] from taking the money out, but it doesn’t smell good without diving in further to understand more,” Souza said. “Typically a nonprofit is looking to make an impact on whatever mission it is they’re trying to accomplish.”

On the whole, little is known about how companies or charities use ERTC funds.

Rick Cohen, a spokesperson for the National Council of Nonprofits, said organizations are not required to report how they are utilized.

Mark Brewer, president and CEO of the Central Florida Foundation, said he believes it would be difficult to find a business, for-profit or nonprofit that didn’t use the money to try to retain talent.

The way he sees it, the onePULSE Foundation is operating in what he calls a “pre-revenue stage” of its business model and has to compete for talent with the private sector.

“If people stayed with reduced salaries and did the work, organizational values would probably dictate reimbursing them or returning them to their previous salaries,” he said. “It appears what they did met the letter of the law and aligned with their pre-revenue business model.”

Memorial plans falter

Last month, a group called Pulse Families and Survivors for Justice blasted the foundation in a letter posted online and sent to media organizations.

“Executives of the onePULSE Foundation still take six-figure annual salaries while survivors struggle with ongoing medical bills, mental healthcare and basic human needs,” the letter said.

The grassroots collective, which claims to represent more than six dozen family members of victims and survivors, published the letter in response to a series of headlines documenting turmoil in the foundation’s plans to build a memorial, including news that the onePULSE Foundation will not seek to acquire the Pulse nightclub — a location that was designated a national memorial site in 2020 by President Joe Biden.

“They are causing emotional distress with every change, with every broken promise they make to survivors and families, and in the process they’re revictimizing families,” said Zachary Blair, a community organizer with the collective.

“When survivors continue to need financial help, you have a nonprofit that’s siphoning money that could be, and should be, going to victims, because there’s only a limited amount of money that people are willing to donate to Pulse, and if that money is not going to a public memorial it should be going to victims and not salaries for people who have no connection to the shooting whatsoever.”

The foundation has until September 2026 to complete a museum, even if it is a smaller version, or the property on West Kaley Street it bought using Orange County tourism tax revenue would be turned over to the county.

It’s the same year Orlando will mark 10 years since the massacre.

The onePULSE Foundation has not submitted a planning application for a museum or memorial in the city, but Bowman said there is underground utility work underway for a pedestrian walking path that connects to the Orlando Health Memorial Paver Garden.

Robb Lauzon, an assistant professor at Juniata College who researched the influence of the public to successfully move the Memorial to the Victims of Communism in Canada, said organizations in charge of setting up memorials need community support and a traditional oversight apparatus, like a regional planning authority.

A memorial, he said, should have been prioritized first in order to give family members of victims a dignified space to grieve. And oversight is important to ensure promises are kept, he added.

“Organizations show their progress because they’re forced to,” Lauzon said. “If they’re not accountable to anyone, then they can keep dragging their feet and collecting salaries for however long they want.”

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