The Mormon Church is in the hot seat again. You may recall that TGA reported on a whistleblower that exposed the church’s finance as being primarily about business and investments rather than charity (their portfolio being over 100 billion dollars). Keep in mind that the main reason that religions are allowed their tax free status is the understanding that monies collected are supposed to be for charitable services. As a result, they were fined a paltry 5 million dollars, which represents roughly .00005 % of their wealth. It would be the equivalent of committing 100,000 dollars of fraud and being fined 5 bucks. Who wouldn’t commit crime with this kinds of punishment?

Not every Mormon is thrilled that money is being used for purposes other than religious. Three members of the church are suing following the whistleblower report that demonstrated that the church uses the funds for everything BUT charitable work.

The church’s corporate arm, the Corporation of the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, solicits donations for humanitarian relief with promises that all donations are used to help those in need. But those promises are untrue, the latest lawsuit argues.

Instead, the church allegedly hid the fact that some if not all donations are permanently invested in accounts never used for charitable work.

I would be surprised if this leads anywhere. It’s notoriously hard to get churches to be held accountable for their scams, and with 100 billion in the bank, it’s not impossible to imagine that quite a few palms will be greased before this is all over.

What should happen is fairly obvious: the Mormon Church needs to be taxed on properties and investments which do not meet the standard of charitable contributions. In this case, this would mean that a large portion of their coffers would finally be placed under the same scrutiny of any other major financial organization. However, I can already predict that gutless government agencies will bend over backwards to accommodate these scammers, for fear that they might be accused of being anti-religious (as though this is a bad thing).  Anyone expecting justice to be delivered when the guilty are religious organizations are bound to be extremely disappointed. At least it’s nice to know that many of their own members have serious misgivings about continuing to tithe the church. That’s a start, at least.