Kenna Says: I know when I see corruption, and this is what it looks like
I want to tell you about a filing.
Every nonprofit that receives federal funding is required to submit a Form 990 to the IRS. It is a public document. It lists executive compensation, program expenses, board relationships, and financial performance. It is, in theory, the mechanism by which the public holds nonprofit healthcare organizations accountable.
In practice, it is only as useful as the people willing to read it.
I read it.
What follows is what I found in the Form 990 filings of The Guidance Center and NARBHA Institute — the two organizations that hold a near-total monopoly on publicly funded behavioral healthcare in northern Arizona. I am not a forensic accountant. I am a survivor of the system these organizations run. But the numbers in these documents do not require a forensic accountant to understand. They require only a willingness to look.
In my opinion, what these documents show is an extreme level of corruption. I want to say that plainly, in my own voice, before I show you the numbers — because the numbers will speak for themselves, and I want you to know that I have looked at them carefully and that is the conclusion I have reached.
The Structure
To understand what the numbers mean, you first have to understand what these two organizations are and how they relate to each other.
The Guidance Center (TGC) is the primary behavioral health provider in northern Arizona. It operates psychiatric facilities, outpatient therapy, crisis services, and community programs. It holds the only northern Arizona contract for Title 36 involuntary psychiatric holds — meaning that when a person in this region is involuntarily committed, they go to TGC. There is no alternative.
NARBHA Institute is the Regional Behavioral Health Authority for northern Arizona. It is the oversight and funding body responsible for ensuring that behavioral health providers in the region deliver quality, accountable care. It distributes federal and state funding to those providers.
The relationship between these two organizations should be one of provider and regulator. TGC provides services. NARBHA oversees and funds those services. That separation is the entire basis of accountability in this system.
That separation does not exist.
The leadership of TGC and NARBHA is interlocking. The same individuals hold roles, receive compensation, and log hours across both organizations simultaneously. Because of this structure it is genuinely impossible — from the outside, and arguably from the inside — to fully disaggregate what is TGC activity and what is NARBHA activity, what is TGC compensation and what is NARBHA compensation, whose interests are being served by any given decision.
That opacity is not an accident. It is a structural feature. And it has consequences.
The Compensation
In FY 2023-2024, TGC ran an operating deficit of more than $500,000.
In the same fiscal year, six TGC executives received raises totaling more than $103,000.
I want you to sit with that for a moment. The organization lost more than half a million dollars. The people running it gave themselves — and each other — raises totaling more than $103,000. This is a nonprofit. It receives the overwhelming majority of its revenue from federal and state sources. From taxpayers. From the people of northern Arizona.
Here are some of the individuals whose compensation is documented across these filings:
Mary Jo Gregory received $792,330 in total compensation in a year when NARBHA posted a deficit of $721,937. The organization she leads lost nearly three quarters of a million dollars. She was paid more than that loss.
Dr. Teresa Bertsch received $458,000 split across TGC and NARBHA — holding clinical oversight roles at both organizations simultaneously. One person. Two organizations. The provider and the oversight body. The same clinical judgment, the same blind spots, the same financial incentives — applied to both sides of what is supposed to be an accountability relationship.
Kerry Blume received $64,500 for one reported hour of work per week.
Vincent Berkley received $50,400 for one reported hour of work per week.
These figures come directly from the organizations’ own 990 filings. I have not interpreted them. I have read them.
The Training Budget
In the same fiscal year that TGC ran a $500,000+ deficit and six executives received $103,000 in raises, I looked for the line item for staff training in the 990.
There is no dedicated training line item.
What exists is this: a “Programs” line item of $17,000 and change. A conferences line item of $1,332.
That is the complete picture of what these filings show for staff development. If we assume — generously, and almost certainly incorrectly — that every dollar of that Programs line item went to staff training, the maximum possible training spend for the entire organization was under $20,000.
The same filing period. A $500,000+ operating deficit. Six executives. $103,000 in raises. Zero dedicated training line items. A maximum possible training investment of under $20,000 — for an organization whose staff interact daily with some of the most vulnerable people in northern Arizona.
I am not telling you what to conclude. I am telling you what the documents say.
And I am telling you what I conclude: in my opinion, this is not mismanagement. This is a choice. This is what an organization looks like when its leadership has decided that its own compensation matters more than the competence of the people delivering care to patients in crisis. In my opinion, this screams corruption.
The Oversight Problem
NARBHA Institute exists specifically to provide oversight of behavioral health providers like TGC. It receives federal and state funding to perform that function. It is supposed to be the mechanism that catches failures, enforces standards, and protects patients.
When the leadership of the oversight body and the leadership of the provider are the same people — holding simultaneous roles, receiving simultaneous compensation, sitting on each other’s boards — oversight becomes structurally impossible.
This is not a subtle conflict of interest. It is a complete collapse of the accountability architecture that is supposed to protect patients in this system.
The peer support and trauma-informed care mandates that federal funding requires — mandates that NARBHA is supposed to enforce — are not being met. The evidence is in the clinical outcomes, in survivor testimony, and in the organization’s own documentation. NARBHA cannot enforce standards against TGC because NARBHA and TGC are, in the ways that matter most, the same organization.
The Pattern
TGC holds the exclusive Title 36 contract for northern Arizona. Every involuntary psychiatric hold in this region goes to TGC. TGC gets paid for every admission.
I have been the subject of two Title 36 holds initiated by TGC staff.
The first was in May 2024. My former therapist — a 40-year LCSW veteran employed by TGC — initiated a Title 36 based solely on the fact that I had stated I felt suicidal. She conducted no formal assessment. I was sent to PAC. What happened there is documented in detail elsewhere on this platform.
The second was in March 2025.
On approximately March 27, 2025, I wrote to my former therapist that I wished I was dead. She emailed me back to ask whether my ideation was active or passive. I responded in writing — explicitly, in an email that still exists — that it was passive ideation.
I asked her to call me. She said she didn’t have time.
She forwarded my email to my case manager — a young woman in her early twenties, BA-level, unlicensed — and asked her to follow up. My case manager became concerned and escalated to her supervisor, a woman with a PhD but also unlicensed. The supervisor instructed my case manager to issue a Title 36 and take it to the crisis department.
No assessment was conducted at any point in this chain.
The crisis department called me. The person on the phone told me only that my “team was worried about me.” They did not assess me. They did not ask me to describe my current state. They did not ask any of the clinical questions that a Title 36 determination requires.
Within 90 minutes, police arrived at my location with a Title 36 hold.
I was on private property. My friends told the police to come back with a warrant. The police left. My former therapist had the hold lifted the following day.
I want to be precise about what this sequence documents: I had stated in writing that my ideation was passive. That written statement was in the possession of my clinical team before the Title 36 was issued. The hold was issued anyway. No licensed clinician conducted an assessment at any point in the chain that led to police appearing at my door.
TGC holds the Title 36 contract. TGC gets paid for Title 36 admissions. TGC staff issued a Title 36 without assessment, against written documentation of passive ideation, for the second time in ten months.
In my opinion, that is a pattern. And patterns, in an organization with this financial structure, are not accidents.
The Complaint Process
In April 2025 I filed a complaint with AHCCCS — the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, the state agency responsible for Medicaid oversight — covering both the May 2024 and March 2025 incidents. To me these events were connected. They were part of the same pattern, initiated by the same therapist, within the same organizational structure.
The filing deadline was May 8, 2025.
I did not discover until June 2025 that my complaint had been filed incorrectly — not by me, but by whoever processed it. When I raised this, I was told it would still be filed correctly, on the correct date.
That was a lie.
My complaint was denied. The denial applied to the entire claim — both the May 2024 and the March 2025 incidents together. The March 2025 incident was well within the statute of limitations on its own merits. It was not evaluated separately. It was not investigated. It was buried under a blanket denial applied to the combined filing.
A complaint that was legally valid and timely was dismissed because it was bundled with an earlier complaint, misfiled by the processing body, and then denied in its entirety despite containing a claim that had nothing to do with the statute of limitations argument used to reject it.
The organization with the most to lose from this complaint proceeding is TGC. The complaint process that failed to file it correctly, promised to correct the error, and then issued a blanket denial operates within a system that TGC and NARBHA have significant structural influence over.
I am not claiming I can prove deliberate obstruction; I know what I see and what I believe. I am stating the facts of what happened and asking you to consider them in the context of everything else documented on this platform.
In my opinion — and I want to be clear that this is my opinion, stated plainly — this is corruption. Not incompetence. Not bureaucratic failure. Corruption. An organization that profits from psychiatric holds issued without assessment, that pays its executives generously while running deficits and spending almost nothing on staff training, that operates its own oversight body through interlocking leadership, and whose complaint process produces outcomes consistently favorable to the organization being complained about.
That is the system that holds behavioral healthcare in northern Arizona.
What The Numbers Mean
I am a survivor of psychiatric harm at a TGC facility. I have documented what happened to me in detail, with names, dates, and a forensic account of the violations that occurred during my admissions.
I am also a person who reads 990 filings.
What I see in those filings is an organization that pays its executives extraordinarily well while running operating deficits, logs their hours across two entities in ways that make accountability nearly impossible, posts a training budget that rounds to zero compared to its compensation costs, and operates inside an oversight structure it effectively controls.
What I see is an organization that has arranged its affairs so that no one on the inside has a meaningful incentive to report harm — and no one on the outside has a clear mechanism to force accountability.
What I see is what happens when public money, regional monopoly power, and interlocking leadership operate without genuine external oversight.
What I see is northern Arizona’s behavioral healthcare system.
And in my opinion — based on the documents, the pattern, and everything I have lived through inside this system — what I see is corruption.
