Philadelphia Fund Reaches Legal Agreement After Seven Years

The Philadelphia Health Care Trust, a private foundation with $40-million in assets, has settled a dispute with the state attorney general’s office about its spending, reports The Philadelphia Inquirer.

The trust’s chairman, Bernard J. Korman, must repay $36,212.50 for travel expenses, and the foundation must provide financial reports every three years to the attorney general’s office. The trust also said that it plans to spend all of its endowment over the next several years.

Some local nonprofit groups were not happy with the results of the settlement. John Dodds, director of the Philadelphia Unemployment Project, told the newspaper that the foundation’s money was “used to benefit the people who operate it.”

His group says it believes that the changes made in the settlement won’t necessarily ensure that money goes to the needy.

The fund, which supports health-care delivery, education, and research in the Philadelphia area, was endowed with money from the $100-million sale of a small health-care nonprofit organization in 1995. In the fiscal year that ended in 2005, the trust granted $2.4-million to nonprofit organizations.