In Rubicon's thread about chaos in the Temple Department of the church, Eric K mentioned that he had heard church funds can not be removed from Finland. I chimed in that I had heard a similar claim about Canada, except money could be sent to schools in foreign countries, so LDS Inc in Canada "launders" their money to get it to SLC, by sending it to BYU.

I decided to check and see if I could find the church's financial report to Canada. I was in luck, and here are some highlights.

Here is the root URL to their report. I think it has a time limit and expires, so you may have to go to Revenue Canada yourself and search under "Charities and Giving" for the church's full name.

BTW, when I leave the "Schedules" page to look at a schedule, and then click back to the root page, the links don't work unless I reload the page. I don't know if that is their bug or my browser bug or what. Minor annoyance. If links don't work, try reloading the page.

All figures are Canadian dollars. CAN$ 1.00 = US$ 0.78


https://apps.cra-arc.gc.ca/ebci/hacc/srch/pub/t3010/v25/t3010ovrvw

Oh, and don't you wish the US required churches to issue a public financial report every year!!!


First interesting factoid from the Basic Information sheet: the church is registered in Cardston, Alberta, kind of a minor city these days. That must have been where they first registered way back when.

Section C states the Church did fund programs outside Canada. More on that later.

Section D just says see the links below.

Schedule 2 - Activities outside Canada - almost a million Canadian dollars sent to Ecuador, and $3.6 million sent to Guatemala. The purpose was not specified, but I suspect it was to support schools, since Canada allows charitable funds to be sent out of country for that purpose.

Schedule 3 - Compensation - ten employees, 9 making $120K - 160K, and 1 making $160K - 200K

Schedule 5 - Non-Cash Gifts. LDS Inc received $3.3 million in life insurance policies, privately held securities, and publicly traded securities.

Schedule 6 - Detailed Financial Information (I'm only listing what I thought were the high points)
Cash and short term investments - $100 million
Amounts receivable from non-arms length persons (I assume that's members) $13.5 million
Other amounts receivable $3 million
Land and buildings in Canada $948 million
Accumulated amortization of capital assets -$592.5 million

total assets (in Canada) $647 million

Total liabilities $9 million. (My, aren't they running a fat profit)

Revenue: charitable donations (I assume tithing) $179.3 million

Amount received from other charities (?) $165,000

Interest $1.7 million

Gross Proceeds from sale of assets $6.9 million
Net proceeds from sale of assets $1.6 million

Revenue from sale of goods and Services $2 million (welfare farm produce?)

Total Revenue $185 million.

Expenditures
Travel and vehicle expense $2 million
Bank charges $66K
Office supplies $3.8 million
Occupancy costs $33.8 million (includes missionary hovels?)
Consulting fees and staff training $210K
Total compensation $14.6 million

(Hokey smoke. Since they only have ten full time employees making roughly $1.5 million total, I assume all the rest is what they give to missionaries. I can't think of anything else that would generate a number like that)

Supplies and assets $3 million
Amortization of capital assets $30.3 million
All other expenditures $19 million

Total expenditures on charitable activities: $107 million
Total expenditures on management and administration $433K (? Office supplies came to a lot more than that. I don't know what this is counting)
Total gifts made to all qualified donees: $68 million
***see below to see where ALL of the gifts to "qualified donees" went***
Total expenditures $175 million


Form T1236 - Qualified donees worksheet (i.e. who did you make charitable contributions to)
BYU - $22,656,136.00
BYU-I - $22,656,136.00
BYU-H - $22,656,136.00

Yep, the only charitable donees of the LDS Church in Canada were three American universities owned by the LDS Church in America. Add those three numbers up, and you get $68 million (I rounded most numbers to the nearest hundred thousand)

They didn't give diddly squat to any Canadians needing charity. But they did manage to keep all their income tax-free, Canadian restrictions on exporting tax-free money notwithstanding.

Weasels.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/16/2022 11:03PM by Brother Of Jerry.

Canada's IRS may care, or not (since I'm sure it's all legal), but I wonder if perhaps the CBC or the major Toronto newspaper would be interested in informing the Canadian public of TSCC's sleazeball "charitable work." If nothing else, it could embarrass the church, which is always entertaining. There's no PR like bad PR.

Nothing like laundering money through BYU. I would love to see BYU’s books and see where that money is going. It very well could be going into someone’s pocket.

It goes into the pockets of every BYU employee, and every provider of goods and services to BYU.

$68 million seems like a lot, but it wouldn't even cover BYU's athletic budget which was $74,141,761 in 2019 (and the $68 million are Canadian dollars).

https://ope.ed.gov/athletics/#/institution/details

Yes, this.

US$18 million or so is a drop in the bucket for a university budget. It's probably a fat drop for BYU-H, but even there the overall budget has to be well beyond that amount.

As for someone embezzling the funds, I think that is highly unlikely. LDS Inc runs a very tight ship, and it has a well known lack of trust of, well, everyone. As any ward financial clerk can assure us, the LDS procedures WRT money are pretty bulletproof.

When it comes to money, LDS Inc is not a bunch of naive yokels.

They are smart not to trust anyone. The lockers at the temple have locks for a reason. Oh we are brothers and sisters in Zion but don’t trust too much or stuff will end up missing.

The Canadian branch of the church has been engaging in this scam for a very long time. Yes, strictly speaking, it's legal under Canadian law. But I did the math and (at the time) the church was giving roughly $60K per year per Canadian student to the BYU campuses -- and still probably charging most of those students tuition.

I have no doubt they charge tuition to **all** the Canadian students at the BYUs, except for those getting a free ride because their parents (OK, their fathers) were mission presidents or sufficiently high ranking GAs.

The purpose of sending the money to the BYUs is not to support Canadian students attending school there. It is to get the money into the US tax-free. Period.

Yes, I understand that. I wish that more countries would crack down on having the donations of church members sent back to the U.S.

This is interesting, and ought to be eye opening for Canadians, but it’s also old news and apparently doesn’t bother anyone up there.

It is old news, though worth knowing that nothing has changed.

I suspect changing the law to exclude certain schools is not nearly as simple as we think. Exclude universities? Some third world countries have universities that need funds.

Exclude US schools? Mormons and other US churches engaged in the same scam would have a fit, and these groups have clout, both in the US, and in Canada. Plus there are schools in the US that do need financial support - historically Black colleges, inner city and First Nations schools, for example.

What would be feasible would be to make a percentage of their "donations" go to Canadian charities.

Yeah, never hurts to try to raise awareness of the ongoing scams.

It's registered in Cardston, mostly because it is to the accounting firm they use (https://pricecomin.ca/). It used to be with an agent in Calgary but as he was closer to retiring he ended up merging/joining (or something along those lines) another firm there. Surprising that they stuck with that company as one of the principal partners did some playing around with the cleaning lady.

The number transferred has fluctuated year to year. I may not remember correctly but I think several years ago that amount transferred was closer to 170 million in one year. But I thought I remembered the next year was nil.

I wish it bothered more people up here. You take some of the smaller mormon towns in that area and consider the amount of money that exits the town with little money to return. Really is a horrible economic burden when all they do is siphon money out and not put any real tangible investment back into the areas.

$3.8 million for office supplies seems a bit excessive!?

I was thinking the same.

Everything is probably marked up excessively by some insider supplier in SLC.

If Canadians want to donate to BYU, they could do it directly. No need to change the law.

The problem is the scam. TSCC can't tell the Canadians, "don't tithe...send it straight to BYU," because that would unmask the scam.

Actually, I guess they could just say Canadians should tithe directly to TSCC in SLC. Koolaid drinking TBMs would probably just do so.