From the article.
For members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, tithing — donating 10% of one’s income to the faith — “is more of a sense of commitment than it is the church needing the money,” Roger Clarke, head of Ensign Peak Advisors, which manages the denomination’s investing holdings, told The Wall Street Journal.
“So they never wanted to be in a position where people felt like, you know, they shouldn’t make a contribution,” Clarke said.
Okay that makes perfect sense. They are hiding all this money just for the benefit of the members. They are just expanding what information they are hiding to help members from troubling history to include troubling financial information. Well, at least they are consistent.
Neither Clarke nor other officials would provide The Journal with details on the size of the church’s annual budget or how much money goes to Ensign Peak. But, the paper reported, they “gave estimates for its main areas of expenditure that, collectively, total about $5 billion.”
In recent years, the church’s reserve fund has grown by about 7% annually, Clarke told The Journal, mainly from returns on existing investments, not member donations.
So the church could literally stop collecting money from members, pay the $5 billion in operating costs, and still make $2 Billion a year in profit on the reserves they have now. If ever there was a clear example of how the God of Mormonism has become obedience for the sake of obedience, this is it. "We don't need the money. God doesn't need the money but members need to show their faith by paying tithing anyways"
Clarke and former Ensign employees said the firm created a system of more than a dozen shell companies to make its stock investments harder to track. That strategy, Clarke said, was designed to prevent members from parroting what Ensign was doing and to, as the paper stated, “protect them from mismanaging their own funds with insufficient information.”
Wait. What? How could members parrot a fund no one knew existed? This does not pass the smell test.
I know right? Because member's donations are having a great impact in Africa right now. /Boggle. How much worse does it have to get in Africa to actually qualify as a rainy day?Church officials described the fund as a “rainy-day account” and to help fund operations in poorer parts of the world — such as Africa, where the faith is booming — where member donations can’t keep up.
Church officials said the global faith, as a whole, gives about $1 billion a year to “humanitarian causes and charities.”
Without any accounting of this claim it is just a bald unsupported assertion. I would guess much of that "charity" is just proselytizing missionary work. Not actually feeding the poor or healing the sick.
The church’s governing First Presidency — made up of church President Russell M. Nelson and his counselors, Dallin H. Oaks and Henry B. Eyring — rejected any allegation of fraudulent behavior, insisting in a news release that the faith “complies with all applicable law governing our donations, investments, taxes and reserves.”
Yeah, no. Mike Quinn has already shown that where they have to disclose their finances they don't pay taxes on profits until forced by the local government to do so, taking advantage of lax enforcement in underdeveloped countries to make more $$$$$. God must be so proud.
During Q&A sessions at the end, employees sometimes asked what the money might be used for, according to one of the former employees, who attended.Church leaders responded by saying they wanted to know that, too, according to this person.
“It was so amorphous,” the former employee said. “It was always, ‘When we have direction from the prophet.’ Everyone was waiting, as it were, for direction from God.” The prophet is the president of the church.
What is it a prophet does again? Turns out he is good at determining the age of missionaries and the length of church meetings but has no clue as to what to do with 100B.