AOL illegal financial practices

I was working on my next article on wide-spread corruption & fraudulent practices in AOL when I received the following comment from Klim on my last post. I felt it is worthy of its own post as it touches on quite a few of those issues which show fraudulent nature of AOL. Many thanks to Klim for contributing. I am sure many of our readers are as pleased as we are to have Klim back, as we have all been missing Klim’s great posts in artoflivingfree blog.

We invite all our readers to feel free to send their posts to blog’s email address. Many of the issues we are raising in this blog are common AOL practices in many countries and many teachers/volunteers know about them. It would be good if all ex-AOL teachers/volunteers expose what they know about AOL and what happened in their own  countries. What we are talking about here are not isolated, one-off happenings, rather AOL unwritten fraudulent practices in a very well-planned and executed con-scheme.

Klim  June 30, 2010 1:05 am

I am an ex full time teacher and I did not live an extravagant life. On the contrary. I know some did and cashed out big time from it (like an European teacher I know who often got a lot of money and gifts from his trips to the Arabian countries), but it is not fair to say all of us did.

Some of us struggled enough to have affected our health and when approached him to ask for the basics, he’d say with a sad look in his face and that very female voice of his, “You know … we barely make it … all these seva projects … all these schools … and the children ….”

What is wrong is he insists it all goes to charity. We repeated it like parrots and believed it in blind faith, but the money does NOT go to seva projects.

First of all, all course monies collected in courses outside of India are taken out of the country – most frequently IN CASH – by some teacher who goes from abroad, and TAKEN BACK to India. Notice this is an illegal transaction in most countries.

 2.)When a participant pays for the course, AoL does NOT give a receipt, thus, not all income is reported, as it should be, in the tax reports. Whatever is being reported are not the real numbers. There are no receipts, nothing to prove absolutely anything.

But, as someone who used to handle these monies, I can confirm all the money is eventually taken out of the countries and taken back to India. Nothing stays for local projects and when is need for them, locals needs to raise the funds. The question is, “Does India only need seva?”. His explanation: “it is so expensive to maintain the ashrams.”

AshramSSSSSS, he says, but it only goes to India, not to Canada, not to Germany, not to Poland, not anywhere else, but India.

3.) Groups outside of India that want to do seva projects can NOT use the money that supposedly was collected in the courses for charity work. I dare say that even the Indian chapters that want to do seva cannot use the money their local chapter raised with the courses. Devotees are asked to raise their own funds for anything they want to do, and seva projects, in general, are used, anyway, as propaganda.

The media, governments and so-called VIPs are suckers for “charity work”. The explanation: it makes them all stronger and gain more merits.

With all that money that goes in, most full-timers did not receive a proper salary, most barely received a proper stipend, and even this money was paid “under the table”. Another illegal action. But please do not put all of us ex full-timers in the same basket. Some of us got seriously hurt by it all and did not earn one cent, but lost one too many.