MORE PROBLEMS with Red Cross blood-banking operations:

For 15 years, the American Red Cross has been under a federal court order to improve the way it collects and processes blood. Yet, despite $21 million in fines since 2003 and repeated promises to follow procedures intended to ensure the safety of the nation’s blood supply, it continues to fall short.

The situation has proved so frustrating that in January the commissioner of food and drugs attended a Red Cross board meeting — a first for a commissioner — and warned members that they could face criminal charges for their continued failure to bring about compliance, according to three Red Cross officials who attended the meeting and requested anonymity because Red Cross policy prohibits public discussion of its meetings with regulators.

That seems rather extreme, and more likely to discourage talented people from getting involved at all, but I suppose it does suggest that the problem is serious. Here at InstaPundit, I’ve been pointing to problems that reduce the size of the donor base, but it’s not comforting to hear that there are blood-handling problems, too. People need this stuff, and it needs to be properly taken care of. Of course, even the most perfect system imaginable will have some mistakes, particularly when it’s as big as the American Red Cross — the world’s largest blood-handling system by a huge margin. But this stuff needs to be addressed.

Plus, this — an indication of the nonprofit sector’s problems in general:

The Red Cross has toyed with selling off its blood operations, or otherwise decoupling them from its disaster work, but has never done so, in part because of a belief that the billions in revenue from blood has subsidized its disaster operations. But its financial systems are so antiquated that no one really knows.

The nonprofit world suffers from inadequate accounting and oversight, even as the amount of money there skyrockets. That’s a bigger problem that needs fixing.