Published at The National Desk

WASHINGTON (TND) — As many nonprofits start soliciting end of the year donations, some are also receiving taxpayer dollars and not complying with state laws.

One city dealing with the fallout of all this is Baltimore, Maryland, where nearly a third of the top 100 nonprofits failed to register with the state but received $65 million in taxpayer funds.

CEO of Open the Books Adam Andrzejewski joined The National Desk’s Jan Jeffcoat to discuss the issue.

“The elites in Baltimore are lining their pockets with taxpayer money. There are 25 nonprofits for nearly $200 million. Let's just take two of them. The top one is Visit Baltimore. They're supposed to be working on tourism in town,” he said. “We found that since 2008, they have spent city federal and state taxpayer money of nearly $100 million, yet not a single added tourist has come to the community. In 2018 there was 26.7 million tourists and in 2022, the latest year, there was 26.7 million tourists.”

Auditors at OpenTheBooks used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the records and quantified the top 25 nonprofits who got nearly $200 million in taxpayer funds. 4,000 city vendors collected nearly $2 billion over a 15-month period.

“Then you have places like Johns Hopkins University. They collected, over the course of the past 15 months, $18 million from taxpayers, and they've got a $13 billion net worth and endowment there,” Andrzejewski said. “They don't need taxpayer money. They don't need to be a city vendor.”