By Jose E. Navarro, MBA | San Diego | September 16, 2026
Andrew Do is a year into a five-year federal prison sentence, convicted of a bribery conspiracy that a U.S. Attorney once described as “Robin Hood in reverse” — stealing from programs meant to feed the poor to enrich himself, his family, and his donors. His conviction should have closed the book. Instead, the Orange County Board of Supervisors spent a recent meeting asking its own outside auditors a question that should trouble every taxpayer in the county: how did any of this go undetected for so long?
The forensic audit commissioned after Do’s plea, conducted by the firm Weaver, found that his misconduct extended well beyond the conduct that sent him to prison. Do had authorized an $814,650 county payment to 360 Clinic, the county’s primary COVID-19 testing provider, despite staff concerns that the company was double-billing. Auditors also found that a construction company tied to Peter Pham — the Viet America Society leader who remains a fugitive facing more than fifteen federal charges — appeared to have performed a kitchen remodel at Do’s personal residence in March 2021, at the same time Do was steering millions in county meal funds to Pham’s nonprofit.
The scale of the underlying scheme is worth restating plainly. Of $19.3 million in federal pandemic relief earmarked to feed needy seniors and people with disabilities, prosecutors say only 15 percent actually reached that purpose. The rest, more than $8 million by Do’s own admission, was diverted — including $385,000 used to purchase a home for his daughter, Rhiannon Do, who separately collected $224,000 in payments from the nonprofit over roughly two and a half years and used $381,500 from the organization’s funds toward a $1.035 million house in Tustin.
What makes this an institutional failure rather than a story about one bad actor is the pattern auditors are now surfacing in a second, unrelated county contract. A separate audit released in August found that Orange County health officials waved off conflict-of-interest warnings for eight months concerning a subcontractor, Warner Wellness Center, on a mental health outreach program — even after the primary contractor had proposed and vetted twelve other subcontractors in advance. Two different programs, two different sets of officials, and in both cases the same underlying defect: warning signs raised by subordinates or documented in county records that were not acted on until journalists or federal investigators forced the issue.
Supervisor Katrina Foley, whose statement following the March audit release called Do’s conduct a case of “crony capitalist contracts at the expense of Orange County taxpayers,” has pointed to contract-policy reforms already implemented — competitive bidding requirements intended to close the discretionary gap Do exploited. Supervisor Janet Nguyen, Do’s successor, went further, calling his federal conviction merely “the tip of the iceberg” and urging further investigation. Those are the right instincts. What remains unanswered, and what the board’s own auditors could not fully resolve, is why the county’s existing internal controls — the ones that existed before any reform took effect — failed to flag a supervisor directing tens of millions of dollars to a nonprofit run by his own daughter, without disclosure, for years, before outside reporting did the job internal auditing was supposed to do.
Orange County’s civil suit against Do, his daughter, and other defendants is set for trial in late 2027, and the federal criminal case against Pham and a co-conspirator remains open. Those proceedings will determine how much of the misappropriated money the county ultimately recovers — a sum that, so far, includes only a partial, voluntary return of $150,000 tied to a separate, still-unfinished Vietnam War memorial project Do also directed funds toward. They will not, on their own, answer the harder governance question this newspaper considers essential: whether Orange County has built a system diligent enough to catch the next Andrew Do before he serves years in office, or only competent enough to explain the last one after the fact.
The Navarro Report will continue tracking the Orange County forensic audit and its civil litigation as part of its ongoing California accountability coverage.
Human-Directed AI Journalism — reporting and analysis produced under human editorial direction with AI research and drafting assistance.