Hacker News Reader

Comment by tdeck | Hacker News Reader

> Thomas our CEO is unreacheable. He only has access to bank and thus to funds.

Does your nonprofit have a treasurer? I thought it was a legal requirement for the treasurer to be a different person from the CEO. In that case the treasurer should be able to present something on official letterhead and gain access to the account.

View on HN

[former fosshost member] We did not (as far as I'm aware) have a treasurer, but did have a volunteer as the CFO. After appointing them, the CEO never fully gave them access to finances and after many requests, eventually just started taking away financial access from everyone else too.

There should be a legal way for them to gain access to the funds without the cooperation of the CEO. A CIC has specific rules for usage of funds which can be enforced especially if the CEO isn't applying them as they are required to.

Not to my knowledge, or we tried but they weren't given access by our CEO so there's that.

A bank can grant a treasurer access to resources if they are legally obligated to the funds.

Has the CEO absconded? This is crazy.

This really highlights why rules for nonprofit governance exist. The CEO could have also run off with donor's money and nobody else in the organization would know.

I don't know if the whole thing was ever officially documented, so we don't really have a way to gain control to the bank account. There's two directors remaining, and no board to speak of as they have resigned.

All in all, we have tried our best to prevent this, but we cannot anymore.

I don't know what's the motive for the CEO to be unresponsive and I don't want to speculate anything, but it's not at all fun for anyone.

Not to be too probing, but have you reached out to an attorney?

Again I'm not a Director, so not my problem.

It is going to be a problem for the radix project though, since given how close the ties are between that and fosshost there are significant questions about the motivation and competence of the team, and their dedication to protecting donor money/supporting the organizations they host etc. If this happens again, are they just going to abandon everything and walk away again? Why did those volunteers decide that the better way to further their mission was to abandon their old nonprofit as a loss and start a new one instead of taking serious steps to regain control and at the least clearly document all leg routes taken/the reason that they had to give up in the end? It's the same community of people that are being asked to trust substantially the same set of people a second time.

You should really put some of this on your website. You don't have to air out all of the dirty laundry, but some clarity about what went wrong would be very helpful to people just learning about it.

That would also help explain what's Radix about and why they are the alternative you recommend.

Legally CEOs are not a thing.

Officially one of the directors, and there's two of them remaining. Even the other Director doesn't have any access to the bank.

> Occupation - Chief Executive Officer And Founder

When you put that on the formation document of the company that you are becoming CEO and Founder of then I am 50-50 on it being a scam.

I have seen it enough times on 'influencer' instagram accounts to know what a red flag looks like.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com