A dispute over bookkeeping methods has led Crisis Center North, an agency in Allegheny County that aids domestic violence victims, to sue the nonprofit that provides nearly 20% of its funding.
The lawsuit was filed Monday in federal court in Harrisburg against the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence, a private nonprofit in Dauphin County, and the state Department of Human Services.
In Pennsylvania, the coalition is the agency that distributes grants to providers of services for domestic violence victims on behalf of the human services department.
Crisis Center North, based in Ross, asserts the coalition has said it will not renew the agency’s funding in 2026, costing it $322,000 a year.
A lawyer for Crisis Center North said its clients are the “real victims” of an “apparent vendetta” by the coalition, a network of 59 domestic violence programs that serve nearly 90,000 people a year.
Last year, Crisis Center North officials said they served more than 2,600 domestic violence survivors and their family members in the northern and western suburbs of Allegheny County. Since the agency opened in 1983, it said in the lawsuit, it has received consistently clean reports from outside auditors.
The center alleges, however, that in recent years, the state coalition “has made a series of demands and issued a series of threats…with no plausible justification, or with justifications which proved to be false or mistaken when investigated,” the lawsuit said.
The center alleges the coalition has never identified any programmatic or governance problems.
“Its demands, instead, have been limited only to onerous paperwork requirements which it repeatedly failed to justify and which it does not apply evenly to recipients of its grants,” the lawsuit said.
The coalition’s leadership clashed with Crisis Center North officials, according to the suit, and when the center reached out to the governor — which governor is not clear — and the Department of Human Services, the problem escalated, according to the suit.
The coalition’s “campaign of progressively increasing and increasingly costly reporting demands of CCN significantly increased after this event,” the lawsuit said.
The complaint asserts the coalition sought to impose additional bookkeeping requirements from Crisis Center North, which the organization viewed as costly, cumbersome and unnecessary — and were a pretext to retaliate against them.
According to the lawsuit, discussions over the bookkeeping requirements have been ongoing for years.
Crisis Center North claimed that cutting grant funding would not only cost it more than $640,000 over the next two years, it would damage its reputation and harm other fundraising, resulting in the agency offering fewer services.
The lawsuit includes claims for due process violations, retaliation for protected speech and breach of contract.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Human Services said she could not comment on pending litigation.
Michael Waterloo, a spokesman for the coalition, said he could not comment on active litigation or specific program issues.
In a statement, however, Waterloo said the coalition is responsible for ensuring that all organizations that receive grants are “held to the same programmatic and fiscal standards” approved by the state.
If an organization fails to adhere to those standards, the coalition may cancel their contract, he said.
“The coalition works diligently, in partnership with the Department of Human Services and all other funders, to ensure accountability of state and federal taxpayer dollars,” Waterloo said.
The lawsuit seeks both compensatory and punitive damages as well as an injunction to prohibit the defendants from wrongfully denying Crisis Center North’s grant renewal.