By Jose Navarro, MBA | The Navarro Report | Orange County Affairs
Santa Ana — “It’s unbelievable.” That was Orange County Supervisor Janet Nguyen’s reaction to the first phase of a forensic audit into her predecessor’s contracting practices. Three phases later, “unbelievable” still undersells it. What began as a single bribery case against former Supervisor Andrew Do has metastasized, audit phase by audit phase, into a portrait of a county government that had every opportunity to catch the fraud in progress — and chose, repeatedly, to look away.
The scheme’s outlines are now well known. Do pleaded guilty to a federal bribery charge in 2024 after investigators found he directed roughly $13 million in COVID-19 relief funds to a nonprofit tied to his adult daughter, Rhiannon Do. The money was supposed to feed needy residents in Do’s district during the pandemic. Federal prosecutors say only 15% of it actually did. At least $550,000 was rerouted back to Do and his two daughters as bribes — including $381,500 escrowed so Rhiannon could buy a $1.035 million house in Tustin, another $100,000 to Do’s other daughter, $14,849 Do used to pay his own property taxes, and $15,000 he put toward credit card debt.
What the Board of Supervisors’ own forensic audit has now surfaced is how many people saw pieces of this happening in real time — and did nothing.
Warnings Nobody Documented
By phase two of the audit, conducted by the outside firm Weaver and Tidwell and covering 681 contracts worth $1.7 billion, investigators found that county officials were told in March 2023 — a full 20 months before Do’s arrest — that Rhiannon Do was running a nonprofit, Warner Wellness, that was receiving county subcontract money. The nonprofit’s own prime contractor raised the alarm, and it climbed through the Health Care Agency all the way to the county’s chief executive. It sat there. The complaint was never formally investigated until November 2023, and only then because LAist published an independent report naming Rhiannon Do’s role and forced the county’s hand.
Along the way, red flags kept surfacing and getting waved off. In August 2022, the nonprofit’s prime contractor told the Health Care Agency it couldn’t even find Warner Wellness registered with the state or the IRS as a nonprofit. That December, the agency discovered the business license was under a different name entirely and had to void a signed subcontract and reissue it — and still didn’t flag the underlying conflict. When a subordinate at the Health Care Agency raised concerns about the arrangement, the audit found that then-director Clayton Chau reprimanded the employee and said Supervisor Do “was a lawyer and he would know if there was a conflict.” The alleged conflict was never reported through the county’s own confidential fraud hotline — the mechanism that exists precisely to catch this kind of thing. Auditors also went looking for minutes of the Board’s Behavioral Health Ad Hoc Committee, whose members included Do and former Supervisor Lisa Bartlett. They couldn’t locate any.
Beyond Warner Wellness
The corruption wasn’t confined to one nonprofit. Auditors found Do routed money for events in his district to companies tied to his friend Peter Pham — Aloha Financial Investment, the same entity that received most of the diverted meal money and funded the down payment on Rhiannon’s house, and Pham’s construction company, doing business as HD Construction and HD Entertainment. LAist’s independent review found over $500,000 in county funds flowed to those two Pham-linked businesses alone, largely for district events and pandemic-era public service announcements dating back to 2016. The audit describes a broader pattern: contracts steered to vendors that donated to Do’s campaigns, awarded without board approval or competitive bidding, raising what investigators themselves flagged as “pay-to-play” concerns.
And the sloppiness wasn’t limited to Do’s own district. The same phase-two audit examined a $500,000 CARES Act grant awarded in May 2021 to Bridgecreek Realty Investment Corp. for outdoor dining structures in Westminster’s Little Saigon business district. Bridgecreek’s final report claimed to account for the full $500,000 on a spreadsheet — but supplied invoices, receipts, or bank statements for only $231,404 of it. The remaining $268,596, 54% of the grant, has no documentation at all. Everything submitted covered a single month, December 2021; nothing was ever provided for May through November, the period the grant was actually supposed to cover. Auditors noted the county’s own contract never even required Bridgecreek to keep receipts.
Four Phases, $4.2 Billion, and Counting
This is not a closed case. Weaver is working through roughly 2,552 county contracts totaling $4.2 billion, awarded between January 2019 and August 2024, in four planned phases. Phase one covered 145 high-priority contracts worth $486 million. Phase two, covering the Warner Wellness and Bridgecreek findings above, reviewed 681 contracts worth $1.7 billion. Two more phases remain, covering another 1,726 contracts worth roughly $2.1 billion — meaning the county still doesn’t know the full scope of what it’s going to find. Supervisor Katrina Foley has called the pattern “deficiencies in oversight and accountability the board continues to address,” and the county has since hired a separate firm to audit its ethics program, including the fraud hotline that failed to catch any of this the first time.
The Auditor’s own limitations are worth noting: Weaver had no subpoena power, no ability to compel testimony or documents from anyone unwilling to cooperate voluntarily. Everything uncovered so far came from records the county chose to hand over. For Supervisor Nguyen, whose own district absorbed the fallout from her predecessor’s scheme and still lacks the funding other supervisors’ offices enjoy, the word “unbelievable” was never really about the scale of the theft. It was about how many chances the county had to stop it — and didn’t.
Human-Directed AI Journalism: I choose every topic, direct the research and framing, and edit and approve the final version of every piece under my byline. AI assists with drafting and research support under my direction.