BALTIMORE (WBFF) — A taxpayer-funded Baltimore City nonprofit that had its offices raided spent $1 million this year on a grant donation to an unspecified organization—an expense one state auditor described as “a massive red flag”—according to documents Spotlight on Maryland obtained through a public information request.
KEYS Empowers had its office on Liberty Road raided by the FBI in September. The head of the nonprofit, Mujahid Muhammad, resigned the next day from his position as a Baltimore City school board commissioner.
The nonprofit has received millions of taxpayer dollars through the federal, state and Baltimore City governments in recent years.
A $824,000 grant from the Maryland Department of Health (MDH) to Keys Empowers was questioned by the Maryland Office of the Inspector General for Health (OIGH) in an April audit that determined nearly half of the funding must be returned due to overfunding and inadequate documentation of spending. The audit covered KEYS Empowers funding between 2021 and 2024 and stated that lags in oversight from MDH “resulted in unrecovered overfunding.”
Documents obtained by Spotlight on Maryland in a public information request revealed that ongoing reviews this year from the OIGH raised additional concerns in KEYS’ unaudited financial statement for 2026, including:
A state auditor for the OIGH wrote in a September email that the $1 million grant expense “is a massive red flag that requires immediate invoice and vendor substantiation.” He described the $273,000 expense as “highly unusual for a barrier-removal and youth clinical therapy program.”
The auditor went on to write in the September email that “the determination on [KEYS Empowers] financial condition cannot be made due to critical missing documentation and severe material anomalies in the provided internally generated reports.”
“Before any abatement can be approved, the vendor must explain and substantiate several alarming, highly irregular expenditures buried in their unaudited financials,” the state auditor wrote.
Two weeks after the state auditor flagged those concerns at Keys Empowers, the FBI raided the nonprofit’s Baltimore office.
Muhammad did not respond to questions about either listed expense.
PeaceGodApparel is run by Isaiah Muhammad, according to Maryland business records. It is unclear if he is related to the head of Keys Empowers, who shares the same last name.
PeaceGodApparel, which sells clothing and is listed as operating at a Baltimore house, did not respond to a request for comment.
A spokeswoman for MDH told Spotlight on Maryland, “Following receipt of the audit notice from Maryland Office of the Inspector General for Health earlier this year, the Maryland Department of Health initiated the process for recouping funding from K.E.Y.S. Empowers, Inc, and is working to resolve the matter as soon as possible.”
The MDH spokeswoman did not respond to questions about the KEYS Empowers payments scrutinized by the OIGH auditor.
Records obtained by Spotlight on Maryland show that KEYS Empowers asked MDH in September not to pursue grant money flagged by OIGH, stating the “repayment of $378,000, or any amount close to it, will cause immediate operational insolvency, force the complete closure of the organization, and destroy essential state-contracted juvenile justice and community safety programs across Baltimore City.”
Shelly Marie Martin, the Maryland Inspector General for Health, emailed Spotlight on Maryland a statement emphasizing that “MDH has final authority to determine whether to accept audit recommendations and is responsible for collecting any funds determined to be owed to the State.”
“OIGH completed an audit of one grant awarded to KEYS Empowers, Inc,” Martin wrote. “OIGH was asked to review appeal documents and provided MDH with a revised audit recommendation on July 24. MDH asked OIGH to review additional documents in connection with a request for abatement. OIGH determined that no opinion could be rendered regarding the vendor’s financial position based on the documents provided. OIGH does not have further information about this matter.”
The OIGH’s April audit questioned several specific expenditures from KEYS Empowers between 2021 and 2024 that lacked supporting documentation, including spending on:
Documents obtained by Spotlight on Maryland list more than $12,000 in payments from KEYS Empowers to Whole Care. The OIGH audit stated the payments between Muhammad’s entities were listed “without evidence of arm’s-length bargaining.”
Amanda Beck, an accounting professor at Georgia State and former member of the City of Atlanta’s audit committee, said MDH needs to ensure better oversight of its grantees.
“They were not routinely doing reconciliations or reviews of the expenditures, which is the cheapest way you can control how those funds are being spent,” she told Spotlight on Maryland. “When you don’t give that routine oversight, then it gets to the point where the organization receiving the funds may start to think that there will never be any accountability. And so the first step in the process would be, especially for sizable grants like this one, to be providing consistent oversight so that things don’t get to the point where the tone is such that no accountability will be expected.”
In addition to the $1 million donation and $273,000 payment to PeaceGodApparel, KEYS Empowers’ 2026 unaudited financials listed expenses including $312,257 for payroll, $126,688 in stipends and $35,273 for “Other business expenses.” KEYS Empowers’ 2025 unaudited financials, also provided to Spotlight on Maryland in a public information request, included $921,760 for contractors, a $128,637 payroll, $69,895 for consulting and $36,050 for “Shared taxi and rides.”
MDH is not the only government agency to fund entities owned by Muhammad.
KEYS Empowers was awarded a $3.2 million contract by the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services (DJS) last year for “Non-Residential Services and programming for youth ordered by the Juvenile Court to receive Multisystemic (MST) model for Baltimore City.” A DJS spokesman told Spotlight on Maryland the contract was canceled in October but ignored questions about how much the nonprofit was paid as part of the contract, what results came through the program and what oversight measures were in place.
Keys Empowers was awarded $1 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act funds in 2022.
Muhammad’s for-profit entity, Keys Development, received more than $32 million through Medicaid between 2018 and 2024.
Keys Development received more than $100,000 from Baltimore City Public Schools while Muhammad served on the district’s board of commissioners. Muhammad failed to disclose his position at the company in his 2023 and 2024 financial forms for the school district, which he corrected in response to an ethics investigation this year. City schools said in October that the contract with KEYS was terminated “in light of recent developments.”
Beck expressed concern with how Keys Empowers received expensive public funding from multiple sources despite not listing a board in its nonprofit tax filings.
“That should be a big red flag because in addition to there not being external oversight that’s being routinely provided, it seems like there might not be any internal oversight,” she told Spotlight on Maryland. “Potentially all of these agencies just assumed that some other agency was providing the oversight I think there’s a lot of breakdowns here that maybe come from a lack of coordination across agencies.”
Spotlight on Maryland is a joint venture by The Baltimore Sun, FOX45 News and WJLA in Washington, D.C. Have a news tip? Call 410-467-4670 or email SpotlightOnMaryland@sbgtv.com. Contact Patrick Hauf at pjhauf@sbgtv.com and @PatrickHauf on X.
This post was originally published on Fox 45 by Sinclair Media Group.
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