Updated Aug. 15, 10:52 a.m.
Ever since news broke late last year about CapRadio’s financial troubles, audience members, staffers and employees of Sacramento State — which oversees CapRadio — have been hungry for answers about how things went wrong, and who was responsible for the chaos that led to layoffs, a scrapped downtown headquarters project and the cancelation of several music programs.
A picture began to emerge last week when Sac State released the results of a long-awaited forensic analysis of the station. The heavily redacted summary, prepared by the Roseville-based accounting firm CliftonLarsonAllen, found over $760,000 in “unsupported” payments, or payments that couldn’t be backed up with an expense report or receipts. The summary also noted that more than half those mysterious payments – some $460,000 – were made to one CapRadio executive, identified in the report only as Subject #1.
CapRadio has now confirmed that Subject #1 is Jun Reina, the station’s former general manager. That’s according to a hard copy of the unredacted summary that was reviewed by a CapRadio reporter.
Two other CapRadio reporters have made no fewer than 13 attempts to reach Reina for comment via email and phone numbers associated with his name, but have not received a response as of publication.
When the summary was released, Sac State President Luke Wood issued a statement saying some portions of the report had been “redacted to avoid jeopardizing a related investigation by the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office.”
A spokesperson for the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office confirmed it was investigating Reina, but would not give further details about the basis of the investigation.
(After the redacted summary was posted online and reported by CapRadio last week, Sac State removed the document from its website, citing the need for clarifications. An updated version had not been reposted before this article went live.)
Reina served as CapRadio executive vice president and general manager between July 1, 2020 and June 2023. The Sac State-commissioned forensic examination focused on the same period of time.
Reina joined CapRadio as chief financial officer in 2007 and was promoted to hold the dual role of chief operating officer in 2012, according to his bio on the station’s website.
“During this time, Jun helped CapRadio maintain financial stability while growing from a 45-person organization to the 118-person organization that it is today,” Reina’s CapRadio bio reads. It also notes that he “played an instrumental role in the planned expansion to a new downtown headquarters.”
In 2023, an initial audit commissioned by the California State University Chancellor’s Office raised significant questions about whether CapRadio could afford to pay for the costly downtown headquarters project. After multiple delays, the project was scrapped this year, according to a CapRadio marketing webpage.
Sacramento State spokesperson Brian Blomster said the university had no comment when asked to confirm if Reina was Subject #1.
Reina is currently the CEO of Family Support Services, a Bay Area-based nonprofit, according to its webpage.
Former station finance director recalls troubling accounting practices
Rocio de Valk, who served as CapRadio’s Director of Finance from 2021 to 2023, recently told CapRadio reporters that she witnessed several troubling financial practices during her time at the station. De Valk’s tenure as finance director coincided with Reina’s time as general manager; however, she did not use Reina’s name when speaking with reporters. She did identify herself as Witness #1 in the CliftonLarsonAllen forensic examination.
De Valk said that while preparing for an annual audit, she asked CapRadio’s general manager for documentation related to the station’s budget.
“Those schedules were never provided to me,” she said.
De Valk said she grew even more concerned during a cash flow analysis a short time later.
“There were some credit card transactions coming through and I just didn't know where the backups were for those transactions,” she said, without mentioning any colleagues by name. “I kept asking that individual to provide the backups, but it just fell on deaf ears. At that point I didn't know what to do.”
De Valk said she didn’t immediately report the problems to CapRadio higher-ups due to concerns over job security: “I just felt that if I would have gone to the board … I would have lost my job right away.”
CapRadio reporters have made attempts to reach several former CapRadio board members, all of whom have declined to speak or did not respond to our requests.
While de Valk knew that CapRadio was an auxiliary of Sac State, she said she wasn’t fully aware that Sac State has oversight of the station’s finances and business practices. For that reason, she said, she didn’t take her concerns to Sac State.
”In my mind it didn’t really register that I should’ve gone to Sac State directly,” she said.
De Valk told reporters she finally brought the unsupported transactions to the attention of Sac State officials in spring 2023, several months after becoming aware of them.
When asked if she’d been contacted by the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office about an investigation into former GM Reina, de Valk said “I can’t comment on that.”
De Valk left CapRadio in September 2023.
Too many titles, not enough oversight
During his 16-year tenure at CapRadio, Reina often held multiple high-level titles at once. For example, he was simultaneously chief financial officer and chief operating officer for approximately three years. Later, he held the dual titles of executive vice president and general manager.
Brian Mittendorf, accounting chair at the Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business, specializes in the study of nonprofit accounting. He said it’s not uncommon for nonprofit executives to hold multiple titles — especially at smaller organizations.
“Non-profit organizations that are small tend to run into circumstances where a lot of the decision-making power is concentrated in executives,” he said. “It could just be a single executive who has the day-to-day operations of the organization all under his or her auspices,” he said.
But he said in an organization with more than 100 employees, that starts to change.
“But if you have 100 employees, it is hard to justify having very different roles — operations and the finance — all under one person's auspices,” he said. “If all of that is kind of centralized to one person, you run the risk of that person exerting too much influence.”
Update: The day after this story published, we received an email from Bird & Van Dyke, Inc., the law firm representing Reina.
Their email stated that the Sac State report “‘does not make any legal claims or reach any conclusions of guilt or wrongdoing’” and that “the issues are under investigation and NO charges have been filed.”
Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct which type of audit Rocio de Valk was preparing for when she asked for documentation related to the station’s budget.
Disclosure: This story was reported and written by CapRadio’s Digital Editor Claire Morgan, Insight Host Vicki Gonzalez, Reporter Megan Myscofski, Producer Sarit Laschinsky and edited by Politics Editor Chris Nichols, with assistance from the California Newsroom.
CapRadio Producer Jen Picard and Reporter Laura Fitzgerald contributed reporting. You can follow our ongoing coverage here.
Following NPR’s protocol for reporting on itself, no CapRadio corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted or broadcast.
Editor’s note: CapRadio is licensed to Sacramento State, which is also an underwriter.
