Global Financial Integrity Reviews

1. Poor senior leadership, with no HR to turn to: all power is consolidated in the CEO, who is not a good manager and whose ethics I did not trust. I had serious reservations about timekeeping practices, as he directed me to fill out my timekeeping in a way that I feared constituted fraud, such as A. being told to bill to grants I wasn't working on and B. to record hours on a day I hadn't worked, to which I objected. I endured quite a bit of rudeness and isolation. For example, when I asked how to access the shared drive, the response I got was "I don't need to know everything that you don't know". 2. It was nearly impossible to get clear direction, and multiple self-initiated proposals I made to more completely fill my time were immediately shot down without any follow-on discussion, despite my asking to do so. It took the CEO nearly a month just to get me an account number I needed, and after this, when I offered to help create a good knowledge management system to prevent such messiness, he said that GFI was "too small for knowledge management". My perspective is that good KM is essential, especially in orgs with high turnover rates such as GFI, which lost almost half its people in a year. 3. As of June 2024, there were multiple warning signs of the org's decline and poor stewardship. There were multiple grant donor audits and a pending lawsuit by a former employee (not me; publicly available docs are searchable on the DC Courts website), and the aforementioned mass turnover in the past year, to include all 3 director positions. Charity Navigator gave GFI a score of 0/15 for its 74% liabilities-to-assets ratio in its last assessment. 4. I finally got a good deep research assignment after I'd given my notice, and after writing a solid 19-page draft in 2 weeks, in return I received a curt email that I would not be allowed to edit it, and that my name would not appear on the publication either. It felt petty and vindictive, and those behaviors benefitted no one and certainly not the overall organizational culture. I gave my best effort despite knowing I was about to leave, and in return for quality work a minimal amount of respect and courtesy would have been appreciated. The entire GFI experience was by far the most disappointing of my career, and almost entirely because of the CEO's lack of organization, planning, communication skills, manners, and questionable accounting practices.

Really distorted work ethics and values, no wonder why people who did nice work all left them. There has long been disagreement between researchers and lobbyists about how to present research findings to the public. Unfortunately, all the researchers left before 2020. Then the lobbyists who stay there tried to disguise themselves as some kinds of specialists. Their former employees left some nice legacies, which unfortunately are appropriated by their disguised "specialists". Starting from then, they insisted to remove author names and acknowledgments from publications to avoid accountability while claim credits for their convenience. Probably only when they degenerate the legacy to what they can handle dare they put their names on their works. Communication about actual work was avoided. What's more, they attempted to block every effort of seeking outside expertise, making their tiny DC office like a cult where they indulged in an illusion of they being the master brains. In reality, they spent funding on gathering with partners who rarely got works done properly, on unnecessary travelings, and on sponsoring some contests that few people participated. Ironically, those specialists who have neither competency nor integrity try to educate the public about integrity.