https://www.smh.com.au/national/mor...f-multinational-tax-rort-20220330-p5a98p.html Mormons Inc: Church accused of multinational tax rort By Ben Schneiders April 3, 2022 The Mormon Church has been accused of engaging in significant tax evasion in Australia, allowing its adherents to collect hundreds of millions of dollars in tax exemptions that are not lawfully available to followers of other religions. Some of its tax activities are run through a shell company, with no paid employees, that could be in breach of Australian tax laws, an investigation by The Sunday Age and The Sun-Herald has found. Senior ex-Mormon, Dr Simon Southerton, has made a complaint to an Australian regulator about the church’s tax practices.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen The investigation has uncovered how the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (commonly called Mormons) appears to have structured itself internationally to minimise tax for its adherents and maximise benefits for itself, in particular in Australia and Canada. In Australia, the church has ensured that donations and tithing – which are not tax-deductible – are routed through a charitable trust to gain 100 per cent tax deductibility. Mormons are required to pay 10 per cent of their gross income in tithing, a significant financial impost on followers. Australia is unusual among English-speaking countries in that it does not allow tax deductions for tithing or church donations. But it does allow generous deductibility for charitable giving. The Mormon Church has structured itself to maximise that tax benefit, and reports that it spends up to 70 per cent of its Australian income on charity. Globally, the church spends less than 1 per cent of its income on charity. “It’s all a ... smoke-and-mirrors thing,” claims barrister Dr Neville Rochow, QC, who had senior roles in the church, including working as its representative to the European Union until 2018, and previously in pastoral and public affairs roles. He claims the church is “taking it off the back of taxpaying Australians”. Dr Rochow said the church spent little on charity. “They don’t set up schools, don’t set up hospitals, don’t have homeless shelters, don’t have places for women to escape when they have bad marriages.” The tax structure has meant that since 2015, Australian adherents have been able to draw on $400 million in tax deductions not available to followers of other religions or denominations. A Mormon Church spokesman did not respond to written questions about this discrepancy, but said the church operated in accordance with tax laws. Dr Neville Rochow, QC, says the church has structured itself to minimise tax. In the mid-2010s, Dr Rochow was involved in a Mormon-instigated econometric study used to justify its tax status and to ensure that religious trust properties of other churches were not taxed. Soon after, it started to direct substantial donations and tithing through its charitable trust – a decision he was not involved in. Before that, in a submission it made to Treasury, the church said it spent just $36,000 a year, on average, on charitable donations between 1985 and 2010. There has been little to no growth in the 61,600 Mormon adherents in Australia over the past decade that could explain the reported 2000-fold increase in charitable giving. Each year, funds are transferred from the church’s charitable trust to a separate entity, Sydney-based LDS Charities Australia. From that entity, about $70 million a year is distributed to global charitable causes. The church spokesman said after LDS Charities Australia was created in 2012, “there was a desire and the ability to significantly increase the support of global humanitarian and development projects”. That $70 million a year is close to the amount the global church – whose strongest following is in the United States – itself says it gives each year on average throughout the world, according to its own annual reports. LDS Charities Australia has no paid staff, Australian website, expenses or infrastructure to run what purports to be one of the country’s major charities, collecting more in individual donations than Oxfam, Beyond Blue or Caritas Australia, the Catholic Church’s international aid charity. It runs in parallel with the Utah-based Latter-Day Saints Charities, which apparently directs the church’s charitable spending throughout the world and includes all its senior staff, management and infrastructure. A church spokesman denied LDS Charities Australia was run by Utah-based Latter Day Saints Charities and said it funded programs through other charities including the Red Cross, Water for the People and the World Food Programme, allowing it to keep costs low. “All decisions about which projects are funded are made right here in Australia,” the spokesman said. The programs it cited were also funded by its Utah-based charity. University of Tampa professor of sociology Ryan Cragun, an expert on Mormonism, said it was inconceivable that the church was making significant global charitable decisions from Australia. “It’s a stunningly hierarchical religion,” Professor Cragun said. “So, any big decisions like that are going to be made in Salt Lake City.” In 2019, the Australian Tax Office made a binding ruling that for an Australian charity to have deductible gift recipient (DGR) status – which allows tax write-offs for donors – it must have Australia as “the focal point of the DGR in a legal or organisational sense”. University of Tampa sociology professor Ryan Cragun Krystian Seibert, a charities expert at Swinburne University’s Centre for Social Impact, speaking in general terms, said the DGR rule meant the operations and management decisions of a charity needed to be made from Australia. “It can, of course, engage and consult with partner organisations outside Australia, but if it effectively outsources operational and management decision-making to individuals or organisations that are outside Australia, that could raise issues under our tax laws.” Mormonism is a US religious movement that began in the 19th century and has become incredibly wealthy. A Washington Post investigation in 2020 revealed the church was secretly running a $US100 billion investment fund, Ensign Peak Advisors, that was accumulating vast tax-free wealth by investing in hedge funds, Chevron, Visa, Apple and some of the biggest landholdings in the US. Professor Cragun said the church, for a time, disclosed its charitable giving, which equated to less than 1 per cent of its revenue. “It is shocking how little they give,” he suggested. ”But on the flipside, this is the part that’s really interesting: they advertise it every single time. And that’s where the ex-Mormon in me is like, ‘That’s exactly what Jesus said not to do’.“ He said many of the church’s current leaders – called apostles – had backgrounds in senior positions in the corporate world. The international church, he said, was run like a multinational corporation, with practices all but identical around the world. According to Cragun, the church is likely to “milk the system for every tax deduction they can... And they’re very, very good at it”. Senior ex-Mormon Simon Southerton has been involved in a complaint to the Australian Charities and not-for-profits Commission about the church’s tax practices. A geneticist, he made a break with the church in the 2000s, after he found that its origin story, of some Native Americans being descended from Jews, was incorrect. “The big problem was I was a bishop (akin to a pastor),” Dr Southerton said. “I went in overnight absolutely knowing that the Book of Mormon was a 19th century fabrication.” He wrote a book about the issue and was later excommunicated. He said it was implausible that $70 million a year was being donated through Australia. The Sunday Age and Sun-Herald investigation has also found that in Canada, the church’s entire charitable giving is diverted to three campuses of a Mormon-run university in the US. The sum – about $C70 million ($74.5 million) a year – appears to be lawful, as the campuses of Brigham Young University have several hundred Canadian students. The Canada Revenue Agency said it was prevented by confidentiality provisions from commenting on specific cases. It said any donations must be made to qualified charity recipients under Canadian law.
This isn't the first time I've heard about someone finding they were lied to in a religious organization and when leaders were confronted, rather than caring about truth, the leadership excommunicated them. Very heartbreaking for people to go through that. Sometimes they lose their ties to family and friends they have sometimes spent their whole lives with.
Governments are complicit in these rorts imo, they've known these things for years and like soaring house prices, refuse to address the problems. https://www.elitetrader.com/et/thre...-in-the-investment-world.340325/#post-5011531
Making money, losing faith: The Mormons in Australia By Ben Schneiders April 3, 2022 Sue Given’s break with Mormonism started when her 13-year-old son overdosed on pills. “That was when he first came out to us - on the gurney, in the hospital.” Given’s son told her that he was afraid she would not love him anymore as he was gay. It took a few more years before Given quit the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (commonly known as the Mormons) for good. Sue Given, an ex-Mormon, with her grandson. Given quit the Church over its homophobia. “When you are a true believer, as I was, challenging your own deeply held biases is extremely difficult,” she says, more than a decade after the event. Later her eldest daughter came out to her too. Given burst into tears - not from the news, she says, but from the realisation that her children had had to hide their true selves from her. Her family had been committed Mormons, her husband even becoming a bishop (akin to a lay pastor) for their congregation. The final break came after an update to the Church’s handbook in 2015 that said the children of same-sex parents could not be blessed as babies, baptised or serve as missionaries. People losing their faith in Australia is not unusual - “no religion” is the fastest-growing category in the Census - but there are aspects of life in the Church that make it different. One is the extraordinary commitment it requires of adherents in both time and money. This is not an hour-or-two-on-a-Sunday faith. Given said she would regularly spend dozens of hours a week on activities around the Church on weeknights and weekends. It is a common story. The financial burdens were also significant, with Mormons required to pay 10 per cent of their gross income in tithes. For a typical Australian household that would be about $9000 a year. Given had been recruited into the religion as a teenager 50 years earlier, despite her parents’ opposition. “I was later baptised without my parents’ consent or knowledge.” But when her break from Mormonism came, it called everything into question, including the origin stories of this 19th-century American religious movement, the institutionalised homophobia and the hefty time and financial commitments. Each year the Church reports to the charities’ regulator that it raises close to $100 million in Australia through a charitable trust fund, with nearly all of that thought to be income from tithes. It is an impressively large sum for a religion with only about 60,000 adherents in Australia, according to the Census. Yet it is not all it seems. An investigation by The Age and Sydney Morning Herald has revealed that the Church may have engaged in a tax evasion, allowing its adherents to collect exemptions not lawfully available to followers of other religions. Australia is unusual among English-speaking countries in that it does not allow tax deductions for tithing or church donations. Instead, it allows generous deductibility for charitable giving. The church appears to have structured itself to maximise that tax benefit through payments of $70 million a year through a charity with no paid staff. It has meant Mormons have been able to draw on $400 million in tax write-offs since 2015. There are serious questions about whether this is permissible, although a Church spokesman insists it complies with Australian tax laws and runs the charity from Australia, as required by the law. That $70 million a year in donations is completely out of step with what Mormons give in other countries, including the United States, where it has more than six million followers. It is also in stark contrast with what the Church said they had given previously from Australia, a total of $900,000 between 1985 and 2010. Given’s experience of the LDS Church - along with other senior ex-Mormons interviewed for this piece - was one where charitable giving was limited. “As far as helping people who were actually in need, there’s just not a lot of that happening. The Mormon Church isn’t providing soup kitchens, homeless shelters and the kind of aid which some other churches do,” she says. A Church spokesman said it had been able to boost charitable spending from Australia as “there was a desire and the ability to significantly increase the support”. They did not elaborate further. Around the world the Church has extensive business interests, including shopping malls and some of the biggest farms in the United States. In 2020, it also emerged that the Church ran an investment fund, Ensign Peak Advisors, with more than $US100 billion ($133 billion) in assets, generating substantial tax-free returns. It was not always so. In the 19th century the Church was chased out of much of the United States and took up arms against the federal government. It settled, after a great migration, in frontier Utah, where it supported polygamy. University of Tampa sociology professor Ryan Cragun. University of Tampa professor of sociology Ryan Cragun, an expert on Mormonism who grew up in the religion, said the Church was vastly different then than it is today. “Nineteenth-century Mormonism has polygamy, they still drink alcohol, they had all sorts of weird practices … that all shifts with the end of polygamy, and then kind of the formalisation of the ‘Word of Wisdom’, which is, you know, no drinking coffee, no alcohol, no tea, no smoking, all of that,” he says. By the mid-20th century - and till today - it represents a kind of all-American wholesomeness with its fresh-faced, clean-cut, suited missionaries. “And if you look at it, it’s very much like a middle-class corporate church in an American Salt Lake City kind of way.” Cragun says Church leaders live comfortably but all this wealth - the $US100 billion investment fund, the tax minimisation - is not about personal enrichment. Rather, he suspects, it’s about long-term corporate planning. Many of its current leaders - called apostles - have backgrounds in senior positions from the corporate world and run the Church as a business, he says. “My sense is they know what’s coming. As far as secularisation goes, they’re losing young people in droves. They’re not really getting any converts in Australia or New Zealand, or most of Western Europe at this point. Even Eastern Europe, they’re not getting anybody, Africa, OK, they’re doing OK there. But even in South America, they’ve kind of mined that,” he says. ”My sense is they’re reading the tea leaves saying… that donating members are going to begin to shrink. How are we going to maintain all the properties that we own, all the stuff that we’re doing?“ He surmises that the “massive war chest” is designed to allow them to “just live off the revenue from that indefinitely into the future, that’s my best interpretation”. Cragun says Mormons were unusual in how much they paid in tithing. A North American study showed they paid more than 7 per cent of their income in tithes - slightly less than they are meant to, but a “stunningly high” amount compared to other religions. There are no comparable figures for the Church in Australia, but its financial accounts indicate that local Mormons are paying a high rate of tithing. There is considerable pressure on Mormons to pay tithes, he says, and once a year, they are required to meet with their bishop. This tithing settlement is important, determining, essentially, whether they are in good standing and can be recommended to go to Temple, an important step in the path to the afterlife. Despite the large financial commitment, another feature of Mormonism, Cragun claims, is how little the Church spends on charity; less than 1 per cent of its income (based on its own previously publicly released figures). It makes a situation like Australia - where tithing is not tax-deductible - tricky for the Church. Without the tax benefit, individual Mormons here would be substantially worse off financially than Mormons in the US, Britain or Canada. Cragun suggests that the Church may “milk the system for every tax deduction they can, which is why you’re seeing this. “Getting a spokesperson to admit that is probably impossible... because that makes them look very ungenerous.“ Mike Perritt was born into the Church and became its national emergency response coordinator, working with the Red Cross and other agencies. He’d regularly work 25 hours a week on Church activities. “To retain its tax status as a charity or religion it has to give money to charities, but it doesn’t like to do that,” he says. Now in his sixties, he left the Church in 2015 as he believed its origin stories were based on “fraudulent claims”. He had paid almost $400,000 in tithes. Perritt says he saw many people on low incomes struggle to afford the tithes and that tithing dropped off when tax deductibility was reduced to 75 per cent for a time. “The Church is very focused on its wealth, it always has been,” he says. The Church’s tax practices have resulted in a complaint being lodged last year with the Australian Charities and not-for-profits Commission. The regulator is legally prevented from providing information on the status of its response - if any - to complaints. Senior ex-Mormon, Dr Simon Southerton, has made a complaint to a regulator about the Church’s tax practices.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Senior ex-Mormon Simon Southerton alleges that the Church is involved in tax evasion through its practices. He is quick to note that it is the Church hierarchy and not ordinary Mormons who are to blame for any claimed tax evasion. “Mormons are encouraged to be honest and truthful in their dealings. It’s just dishonest, to make it look like the Church is so extremely charitable when it’s not,” he says. “I don’t blame ordinary Mormons here … this smacks of US lawyers exploiting legal loopholes to pull the wool over the eyes of the Australian government.” Barrister Neville Rochow, QC, was until 2018 the Church’s representative to the European Union and served as a bishop and in stake (similar to an archdiocese) and missionary presidencies. He converted in his teens and served in missions in Tasmania and later Germany, where he met his wife. The church had many positives for him: “I came from a fairly dysfunctional childhood and was really looking for a way to have a happy family.” Dr Neville Rochow, QC, says the Church has structured itself to minimise tax. Rochow says he was “so bloody faithful” and was seen “as a repository of all knowledge on doctrine”. “I was their pin-up boy; I was respectable and had letters after my name. The Church would trot me out when they needed someone respectable that could talk with anyone about anything.” He spoke at the House of Lords, the European Parliament and the European Court of Human Rights. “[The Church] opened a lot of doors for us, we derived a lot of benefit from it.” Yet when he returned to Australia from Europe in 2018 he experienced a loss of faith, after extensive reading and his wife being diagnosed with cancer. “For the first time, instead of just going on ‘in faith’ and accepting explanations we were fed, I extended the principle of following where the evidence led,” he said. “We soon both realised that it was, to use the vernacular, a load of crap. There was barely a single claim that withstood objective scrutiny.” He is speaking out now due to what he claims is the Church’s financial engineering. “I don’t have any resentment or anger at all but I do not want any church to benefit from fraud of the Tax Commissioner of any kind. I don’t think that’s right.” Sue Given is also angry at the perceived tax practices of the Church. She joined a US class action to reclaim the tithing she paid over decades, which she said was not voluntary. “My husband is a lot more positive than me. He sees the positives in Mormonism’s focus on family and I could agree with those positives if they indeed applied to all families, including LGBTQ+,” she says. “As a family we have never been closer or happier than we are now, out of the Church.”
From wikipedia....Quote: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, often informally known as the LDS Church or Mormon Church, is a nontrinitarian, Christian restorationist church that considers itself to be the restoration of the original church founded by Jesus Christ. The church is headquartered in the United States in Salt Lake City, Utah, and has established congregations and built temples worldwide. According to the church, it has over 16.6 million members and 51,000 full-time volunteer missionaries.[4] The church is the fourth-largest Christian denomination in the United States,[9] with over 6.7 million members as of 2021 (self reported).[10] It is the largest denomination in the Latter Day Saint movement founded by Joseph Smith during the early 19th-century period of religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening. End of Quote. Note to @studentofthemarkets: Think about it, millions of members who probably aren't aware their church elders are bending the rules, exploiting the financial system to enrich themselves and/or the church. In otherwords, the wool pulled over their eyes as sheep are prone to do. Millions of religous people hoodwinked by their own kind. As I keep saying, humans (especially religous types) are suckers for being scammed, they fall right into it because they take at face value what is taught by their leaders. They trust their heirachy to be honest. I have a personal rule; Never trust a man wearing a white shirt.
I bet, if every Mormon were to read the report their Mormon church were up to financialy chicanery, +95% would disbelieve and say; "The devil trying to attack again". Ol' Lucifer sure comes in handy as a scapegoat.
I completely agree! And the Bible tells us exactly who is behind all lies: Satan is the father of lies and a murderer. Thankfully, God tells the truth, and Jesus even said, "I am the Way, the TRUTH, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Me" Good vs Evil Truth vs Lies God vs Satan Heaven vs Hell Sadly, this world is the battle ground because of Adam and Eve's choice to follow Satan's advice.
I was listening to this song just now and they sang, "That He would leave His place on high and come for sinful man to die. You count it strange, so once did I, before I knew my Savior." That made me think of you.
PROOF FOR GOD AND THE BIBLE: Let's just suppose, for a minute, that you are right: people wrote the Bible and it is not from God. If that were the case, then the original protoevangelium, a big word that means the first time there was given a promise of One to come to defeat Satan: he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel Gen 3:15c came from the imaginations of a man. Since Moses was part of the Israelite nation, the beginnings of the idea of a promised One must have existed long before Moses. All the animal sacrifices to show a need for a substitute also originated from people, not from God. OK......moving on: Then you have the other prophets who came later on, who said that God spoke to them directly and they mention the One to come suffering, being a substitute for sin and gave a specific prophecy saying that this coming One would be here the time this coming One was to be here on the earth (which happens to coincide with when Jesus was on the earth.) “Know and understand this: From the time the word goes out to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Anointed One, the ruler, comes, there will be seven ‘sevens,’ and sixty-two ‘sevens.’ It will be rebuilt with streets and a trench, but in times of trouble.After the sixty-two ‘sevens,’ the Anointed One will be put to death..." Daniel 9:25, 26a So, all the many years worth of descriptions of Jesus culminating in His actual appearance and substitutionary death and resurrection ALL HAPPENED TO EVOLVE SLOWLY, LIKE A STORE WHERE ONE PERSON ADDS TO IT AND THEN ANOTHER PERSON ADDS TO IT, AND USUALLY THOSE STORIES END UP WITH A FINAL VERSION VERY UNLIKE THE ORIGINS OF THE STORY. But in this case, although the story was passed from generation to generation, the theme has been the same. Isn't that some sort of unlikely phenomenon, if it all happened through people only, not God? ESPECIALLY when you consider that very few people in the Old Testament times actually thought that God was going to come to die for their sins Himself. They knew there was a promise that God would take care of it, and they had faith to believe that, but imagining that God would come in the flesh to die on our behalf was far, far from most believers' minds at that time. Yes, a few had direct revelation recorded in Scripture, but either it was given directly by God, or humanly speaking, they were on the fringe and not representing the majority of the Jewish views of their Messiah. So, then, even in what is thought to be the oldest book of the Old Testament, the Book of Job, there was a belief that God was a Redeemer, because Job was recorded as saying, " “Yet as for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, And at the last, He will take His stand on the earth. Even after my skin is destroyed, Yet from my flesh I will see God, Whom I, on my part, shall behold for myself, And whom my eyes will see, and not another." Job 19:25-27a So, the proof is in the fact that people could not have come up with the idea of God coming to die for them on their own. It was very far from the Jewish mindset, yet it was definitely in the Scriptures as a recurring theme. How did that happen if not from God? How did men unknowingly come up with what you have called the greatest con job? Well, obviously, because it wasn't something people would think of on their own. It's not possible for people to have plotted this story together, because of the timespan of thousands of years of this same message. People are just not organized enough to do that, especially when the message wasn't really understood clearly by those people-a few shared it from direct revelation, but it was not something even they understood very well. So, the Bible story is proof that the story of God becoming man and dying as our Substitute originated with God.
There's no two ways about it, the human spirit has enormous talent and imagination, enormous love and beauty. But that same human has the ability for unspeakable evil and corruption. The millions of Mormons we speak of (even the Russians), these people are you and me, we are all made from the same clay. So God will judge us for being human, for failing? I think you've answered that question before, but the fact is, we are open to deception, all of us, every single one of us, no matter if the Pope or King of England.