Doing our due diligence; where have courtesy and honesty gone?

I have not written about dealing with difficult, rude and dishonest applicants for a long time now.

It doesn’t mean they don’t exist; believe me, they do. And we do occasionally encounter them.

A few weeks back, we had to deal with an extremely rude applicant who blames her vet and everyone else for all the mistakes that she keeps doing. When she first started claiming for our neutering aid, she didn’t know what to do at all. I had to spend lots of time on whatsapp teaching her how to make the photo collages, what is required of the receipt, how to fill up the e-form, etc. And she would keep forgetting and I would have to repeat the entire process again and again. And whenever anything is amiss, she blames the vet or her transport person. Everyone is at fault except her.

The final straw came when she made another mistake and I had to tell her to correct it. That’s when she lost her temper and accused us of not paying her our aid. We actually did pay our aid, but that would be our final aid. Enough of tolerating her rudeness for months.

Then today, we caught another applicant cheating. She had claimed earlier for two cats and was putting in another claim for two more cats. I had to contact her via whatsapp to ask for more information and from there, the story started to unfold. To cut a long story short, this person was double claiming. There was a friend already sponsoring for the neutering, but she did not declare this. And yet, these two questions are on the first page of our applications forms, both for neutering, vaccination and medical aid.

This question is at the beginning of page one: 

And this is at the end of page one:

Applicants have to tick both in order to progress to page two of the form. And again, on the last page (page three), there are four declarations of honesty which the applicant has to answer.

Let me give you the exact figures of this case:

The total bill for the neutering and vaccinations of two cats was RM510. Her friend had already given her RM400. She was claiming RM350 from us. This means, she would have received RM750 in all. That is a profit of RM240 into her pocket.

When asked, she did not tell her friend that she was claiming from us. And she also did not tell us that her friend had given her money. So her friend and we would have been oblivious to the fact that she had received money from both sides. We wouldn’t have known had I not kept asking her questions because of certain suspicions in her answers. It took me almost three hours of conversation to get to the truth. Luckily she had make many mistakes in her application so we had not released any funds to her.

And the end of it, she kept saying that she didn’t know it was wrong to claim from both sides and to profit from it. That was when I knew it was a total waste of time talking to her. When one doesn’t even know one is wrong, there is no need to keep talking.

Making money by using animals is so, so wrong. Cheating and lying are not unintentional or accidental. Since she doesn’t even know that profiteering from using animals is wrong, we have blacklisted her.

We will keep doing our due diligence because we owe it to our donors to maintain the integrity of how our funds are used. We can only hope none of such cases will slip through the cracks.

 


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