The former head of a San Francisco homelessness organization appeared in court on Tuesday after being accused of misappropriating $1.2 million and stealing $91,000 in public funds, the latest in a string of city nonprofit spending scandals in recent years.
Gwendolyn Westbrook, who served as the CEO of the United Council of Human Services for two decades, faces nine felony charges related to the misuse and theft of city funds.
She was booked into county jail late Monday and later posted bail.
“Gwendolyn Westbrook enriched herself and misappropriated millions of dollars in public funding meant to benefit the community,” said City Attorney David Chiu, whose office tipped off the district attorney and FBI to allegations of financial mismanagement at UCHS in 2022, leading to an investigation by the White Collar Crime Division.
Westbrook is charged with misappropriation of public funds, multiple counts of grand theft and presenting a false invoice for payment. Court documents also allege she filed false state tax returns for the four years between 2020 and 2023.
Prosecutors allege that Westbrook made undocumented cash withdrawals from UCHS accounts and self-issued payments while “exercising near-exclusive financial control over the organization,” which operated a soup kitchen and connected formerly homeless tenants with housing and services in the Bayview–Hunters Point community.
The district attorney’s office said that while $1.2 million in the misappropriated funds has been traced to Westbrook, additional large sums of money pulled from UCHS accounts are unaccounted for.
Court documents allege that between 2019 and 2022, Westbrook paid herself a “hidden ‘double salary.’”
She was paid more than $467,000 through an “unusual” compensation method involving the nonprofit’s fiscal sponsor, Heluna Health, while also self-issuing nearly $400,000 in payroll checks between 2019 and 2023.
The second salary “appears totally undocumented, unaudited and went under no oversight,” District Attorney’s Office investigators wrote.
Between 2019 and 2023, investigators said $897,000 of the nearly $3 million in cash that Westbrook withdrew from UCHS accounts was deposited into her own. In addition to the funds that have been traced back to Westbrook’s accounts, investigators say $1.4 million remains unaccounted for.
According to bank statements, Westbrook made repeated payments for luxury vehicles and high-end purchases at retailers — including from a jewelry store owned by two of UCHS’s board members — that “far exceeded” her salary and legitimate sources of income.
It “is consistent with Westbrook simply spending some of the ‘missing’ UCHS money on her personal lifestyle,” investigators allege.
A 2022 city controller’s office audit that spurred the investigation found that UCHS, which had received nearly $28 million from the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, had placed many tenants in housing who might have otherwise been ineligible for the units “at the discretion of staff.”
It also concluded that the majority of tenants’ incomes were improperly calculated and that UCHS collected and kept revenue that should have gone to their fiscal sponsor at the time, Bayview Hunters Point Foundation. Following the report, Chiu’s office referred the investigation to the San Francisco district attorney and the FBI.
Westbrook appeared in court on Tuesday and is set to return for her arraignment on March 9.
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