The Providence Foundation of San Francisco is one of many groups that receives money from the city to help it deal with homelessness. Yesterday the Providence Foundation was accused of fraudulently billing the city for more than $100,000 and barred from applying for city funds for five years in the future.

The false invoices, according to the City Attorney’s Office, were submitted in 2022 and linked to an exterior paint job and the removal of deadbolts at the Oasis Hotel, a family shelter on Franklin Street that was at one point under threat of closure. But investigators said the work never occurred.

“There’s a difference between having challenges with financial compliance and intentionally defrauding the City and its taxpayers,” said City Attorney David Chiu in a statement on Monday. “This nonprofit took over $100,000 of public money meant to benefit people experiencing homelessness. That cannot be tolerated.”

Billing the city for work it never performed was just the start. The organization also violated a rule against nepotism.

Providence is also accused of violating an anti-nepotism provision in its grant agreement with the city involving several hires. Chiu's office said the company hired two of the executive director's children and hired a child of the group's vice president of the Board of Directors.

The person in charge of Providence is Patricia Doyle. She has been through all of this before.

Patricia Doyle, executive director of the Providence Foundation of San Francisco, was flagged by city officials more than a decade ago after they found the previous nonprofit she ran overspent its contract budgets and billed the city for credit card purchases without supporting documentation. That nonprofit, the Inter-City Family Support and Resource Network, was denied a city contract renewal due to “a substantial degree of fiscal mismanagement,” according to records obtained by the Chronicle. Now Doyle’s Providence Foundation is accused by the city of similar patterns of mismanagement...

“Someone at the city should have raised a red flag when they became aware that she (Doyle) was at the Providence Foundation,” said David Brown, an accountant who previously worked with Doyle. “She’s doing the same things she was doing back then.”...

Emily Cohen, a spokesperson for the city’s homelessness department, did not answer questions regarding the matter, including whether the department was aware of Doyle’s previous problems. Cohen said in a statement that the situation was “under investigation” and “HSH cannot currently comment.”

The city was aware that Providence was not managing its funds or its property well and has been trying to get it back in compliance for at least a year. 

The Providence Foundation is the nonprofit philanthropic arm of Providence Baptist Church, a fixture of the city’s historically Black Bayview-Hunters Point community for more than six decades...

The Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing sent a series of “correction action” letters to Providence over the past year instructing it to address myriad deficiencies.

Those issues include overspending city contracts by hundreds of thousands of dollars, hiring for positions not approved in the budget, failing to maintain compliance with federal and state contracting requirements, and allowing beds at a family shelter to sit empty...

Providence leaders have repeatedly shown up late or skipped meetings and failed to provide critical information and paperwork to the city on time, according to corrective letters obtained through a public records request.

Finally, this is just one example of problems the city has recently uncovered with its homelessness contractors.

Over the past six months, city officials have accused leaders of the nonprofit J&J Community Resource Center of forging invoices and double billing and alleged that the head of the public-safety-focused nonprofit, SF Safe, misspent hundreds of thousands of dollars on expenses such as private limo services, a trip to Lake Tahoe and luxury gift boxes. City officials also notified the FBI that another nonprofit, the United Council of Human Services, improperly collected rent and stood by when access to housing was illegally sold to residents.

San Francisco spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year on homelessness contractors like these. Whenever the government is giving away that kind of money, fraud is inevitable. Frankly, the $100,000 this group bilked the city is petty cash in the overall scope of the homeless industrial complex in San Francisco. All of these people and groups have a vested interest in having this problem continue.

That said, the city has made some changes recently which seems to have cleared up some of the tent encampments. The number is now about half of what it was last summer. But as you'll see in this report, even if there are fewer tents, a lot of local residents don't see a big overall change in the state of the city's sidewalks which are still full of homeless people and their stuff.