July 20, 2006 | Read Time: 3 minutes
A former employee of the Boy Scouts of America’s Baltimore council has sued the local group, accusing the organization of defrauding donors by exaggerating the number of youngsters registered for its programs and for firing him when he raised questions about its enrollment practices.
In a lawsuit filed in state court last month, Paul Mintz says the organization has repeatedly inflated membership figures to impress contributors who make grants based on the number of boys served.
Christopher Shelby, the Baltimore council’s director of field services, denied the allegations. He said the group has strictly enforced procedures in place to ensure proper membership counts, and that Mr. Mintz raised the charges only after he had received a poor performance review.
Mr. Mintz worked for the council from 1998 until January, when he was dismissed after refusing to sign a document certifying that the council follows membership-count rules set by the Boy Scouts of America, the national organization in Irving, Tex.
Mr. Mintz sued his former employer in state court for wrongfully dismissing him.
In the lawsuit he says that executives of the local council engaged in “a persistent course of conduct designed to inflate enrollment figures, falsifying both individual enrollments and numbers of packs of Cub Scouts and troops of Boy Scouts.”
The executives’ compensation, he says in the suit, was tied directly or indirectly to the membership counts, as was the size of grants the Scouts received from other nonprofit groups, such as the local United Way and two local foundations, the Harry and Jeannette Weinberg Foundation and the Marion I. and Henry J. Knott Foundation.
Spokesmen for both the Knott and Weinberg Foundations say that grant size is determined more by the expected results of scouting programs than by the exact number of youngsters involved. But, they each add, their organization will stay in communication with the Baltimore council regarding the allegations.
“We’ll clarify what’s going on if issues arise,” says Ted Gross, a program officer at the Weinberg Foundation, which last fall pledged $150,000 to the Scouts over three years.
Patrick Smith, communications director at the United Way of Central Maryland, says that while his organization takes seriously any allegations of wrongdoing among grantees, the United Way is confident that the Boy Scouts are doing “a nice and proper job.”
Other Cases
The council’s Mr. Shelby says that about 46,000 youngsters are registered for scouting programs in the Baltimore area.
In an interview, Mr. Mintz said that he does not know enough about the entire organization to dispute that figure.
However, he said that in the city of Baltimore, the territory he oversaw as a field director, the council’s recent membership count of about 5,580 youngsters was inflated by 34 percent, or roughly 1,900 people.
Allegations of membership inflation have arisen periodically at Boy Scout groups around the country for decades.
In a case last year in Atlanta, a Boy Scout executive resigned after an audit found that the organization had falsified the registration of about 5,000 youngsters. And just last month an audit released by a Birmingham, Ala., Boy Scout council revealed that membership rolls there had been inflated by more than 13,000 youths over three years.
