LOVE Social Services document library
The Daily News-Miner obtained hundreds of pages of documents from a variety of state and federal agencies during its investigation into LOVE Social Services Center in 2005 and 2006. The documents most pertinent to the federal government’s criminal case against Jim and Chris Hayes, two of the founders of the center, are available for viewing here.
Note: All documents are in PDF format. You can download Adobe Reader for free to view these documents. The largest files are roughly 1 MB, and should take a few minutes to download on a dial-up Internet connection.
Federal indictment The federal government indicated Jim Hayes and his wife, Murilda “Chris” Hayes, in January 2007 on a mixture of charges: conspiracy, theft, fraud, misapplication of federal funds, money laundering, and filing false tax returns. Chris Hayes faced many more counts than her husband.
The indictment was updated twice as new charges were added. The second, and final, “superseding” indictment was issued in November 2007 and lists all charges against the Hayeses.
Congressional earmarks Despite all the complex rules that guide Congress, earmarks are usually very brief and provide almost no detail about the recipient, as can be seen in the accompanying files that document where LOVE Social Services got its money.
Many earmarks are found in what are called “committee reports” that accompany the actual bill. In spending bills, such reports explain how members of Congress want the agencies to divide up the broad categories of money provided in the bills.
The LOVE Social Services earmarks documented in these files all are found in five reports, from 2000 through 2004, filed by “conference” committees. Conference committees are the joint House-Senate panels appointed to work out a final version of different bills passed by the two bodies of Congress.
The reports themselves can be hundreds of pages long and the earmarks hard to find, so we’ve whittled them down to just two pages. The first page in each of these files is the cover page of the report. The report’s title, found in the upper right-hand corner of the cover page, carries two numbers, the first of which denotes the session of Congress and the second of which denotes the order in which the report was filed among all the reports in that session. The second page contains the actual earmark, which we’ve highlighted with arrows.
Federal agencies, from a strictly legal standpoint, do not have to follow earmark language in these reports, because reports are not law. However, most agencies do so anyway, in deference to Congress. The agencies sometimes take administrative expenses out of the earmark, so the actual amount delivered to a recipient might appear slightly smaller than the amount directed by Congress.
Grant material
Applications and budget proposals
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Department of Justice provided the Daily News-Miner with the forms that LOVE Social Services submitted to obtain money directed to it by Congress through the office of Sen. Ted Stevens. The application forms submitted by LOVE Social Services were accompanied by proposed budgets, descriptions of the center’s activities and several pages of miscellaneous supporting material. The material provided here includes the application cover page, the proposed budget summary and, with regard to the Justice Department grants, the proposed budget details submitted by LOVE Social Services. There is no budget detail available for the HUD grant.
A note: The “August 5, 2005″ notation in the top-right hand corner of some pages of the 2003 and 2004 budget worksheets for the Department of Justice grants was applied by the department’s computer system when a department employee viewed an electronic version of the paperwork. A department spokeswoman said that LOVE Social Services submitted the worksheets in 2003 and 2004.
Financial documents
Detailed financial reporting of how the grant money was spent, as compared with how the money was proposed to be spent, do not exist, according to the government. The documents provided here include the periodic grant draw-down statements, known as Financial Status Reports, a detailed run sheet of the Justice Department’s payments to LOVE Social Services, a budget memo from the Justice Department, and a document that the Department of Housing and Urban Development says is the only financial record it has that indicates how some of the money was spent.
Grant updates
LOVE Social Services was required to submit periodic progress reports to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Department of Justice about how the grants were helping the group to achieve its goals.
IRS filings Federally tax-exempt organizations such as LOVE Social Services are required to file an “information return”as opposed to a tax returneach year with the Internal Revenue Service if they have annual gross receipts in excess of $25,000 in a tax year. The return for tax-exempt organizations is known as a Form 990 and requires the detailed reporting of income and expenses and the naming of officers and other key personnel and their compensation. It is a public document. Forms 990 are available for LOVE Social Services only for the years 2003 and 2004. The IRS has informed the News-Miner that LOVE Social Services’ forms for 2001, 2004 and 2005 are unavailable, and an official at LOVE Social Services did not know whether the organization filed them as required.
The directors Documents filed with the state of Alaska and the IRS show the names of those who founded LOVE Social Services in 2000 and who were on its board of directors in 2006.
