Introducing the Widow's Mite Report Series

John Dehlin [00:00:01] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is July 21, July 21, 2023, and we are super excited today to have with us again for the third time, an illustrious panel that is here to discuss the Widow's Mite Report. And I was super excited to see in the Salt Lake Tribune just this past week that the Widows Might report, which is a report put together by a committee of anonymous scholars and professionals in the financial industry, has attempted to provide financial transparency for the Mormon Church. Since the Mormon Church hasn't been willing to provide the transparency that many feel is needed.

John Dehlin [00:00:46] We've covered the Widow's Mite on at least two episodes so far. And today we're going to be talking about the Mormon Church's claims around humanitarian efforts and charity and the deep dive that the Widows Mite Group has done to try and tease out what we can interpret from the Mormon Church's claims of spending, I don't know, a billion plus a year now on humanitarian efforts and, or charitable efforts when prior to only a few years ago, they made claims. Nowhere in that ballpark. And only it was after the Ensign Peak revelations and the discovery that the Mormon Church had well over $100 billion in reserves, stocks and bonds and real estate and cash, etc.

John Dehlin [00:01:44] The that all of a sudden magically the Mormon Church starts reporting very, very large humanitarian and charitable contributions. That's what we're going to be talking about today. And we have with us again Spencer Anderson along with Radio Free Mormon and Rebecca Bibliotheca to be here to provide limited commentary as we've decided. So first, let's start with Spencer reintroducing himself to our audience.

Spencer Anderson's Background and Role

Spencer Anderson [00:02:13] Yeah. Hi there. Thanks for having me on, John. I'm Spencer Anderson. I'm an assistant professor of accounting and I'm now at Indiana University. I just moved, as you can see, I don't have the, I don't have anything on my wall back here yet. So I'm still kind of in the process.

John Dehlin [00:02:29] And from a fighting a lion eye to a Hoosier, is that to a Hoosier. Okay.

Spencer Anderson [00:02:35] Yeah, go Hoosiers. I guess go fighting Illini too. They're great too.

Radio Free Mormon [00:02:39] Okay.

Spencer Anderson [00:02:41] And my, my expertise in my research looks at financial accounting, standard setting issues, regulation with disclosure and things like that. So really excited about the accounting issues that are prevalent throughout this discussion in this arena today. So thanks for having me on.

John Dehlin [00:02:58] Anything else you want to say about the Widows Might Report Group that you're kind of you know, relating their research,

Spencer Anderson [00:03:09] just that they're, they're great. They've been vindicated over and over again by press articles that come out down the road after widow's might has already kind of done its analysis and information that's come out when the church provides additional disclosure that lines up completely with what widows might was doing. Obviously the, the things that they provide are estimates, but they've always been like really close in the, in the ballpark. And I've seen a lot of the due diligence that they do. So I think, you know, from my perspective, you can trust the stuff that they've put out so far.

John Dehlin [00:03:44] I love it. Any, any commentary you want to provide really quickly on the latest Salt Lake Tribune article? I was super excited to see it.

Spencer Anderson [00:03:55] Well, I didn't read it, so. Sorry. Do you want to provide something? I saw that. I'm not a subscriber, so.

John Dehlin [00:04:04] Yeah, yeah. Basically the, the basic headline was it looks like the LDS church is on track to become a trillion dollar faith. And you know, that's something that I've thought was likely for some time. And it was just fun to see the Salt Tribune finally be willing to kind of state that publicly because it is an inevitability at this point.

Spencer Anderson [00:04:30] Yeah, thanks. Yeah, so. And also, you know, like the Wall Street Journal and other big outlets like the Salt Lake Tribune have reached out to Widow's Might. So you can see that kind of, they, you know, they have the credibility that you would expect them to have if they were doing this kind of work that, you know, we're claiming that they're doing. In addition to that. So the Wall Street Journal, they had an estimate of temple costs for an Idaho temple. And you could kind of calculate the square foot, the dollar per square foot estimate of how much it would cost to create that temple. And it was like right on the nose with what the widows might had estimated for per square foot temple costs. And so once again, it gets. Widows mite just keeps getting vindicated by all of these new articles that come out.

John Dehlin [00:05:21] And I guess I'm hoping that the morale on the team is high and that the participants on the team feel very happy with the much deserved exposure.

Spencer Anderson [00:05:33] Yeah, I think that, you know, I think that they feel like there has been some actual real good that's been done. So. And I think we'll talk about that a little bit later today. But I honestly do believe that some of the criticism that has been publicized through the widow's mites efforts has caused the church to ramp up Its, its charitable giving. And in the end that's a huge contribution, right? If you have more people that aren't going hungry, more people that are being educated, more people that are being helped out in the world, who cares whether it comes from the church or some other entity, more people are being helped.

Spencer Anderson [00:06:10] And the Widow's Might has had a part in talking play, in promoting that and helping that. And just in general, I would encourage the audience to go to the Widow's Might Report website because even though we've covered a lot of this stuff, they've done a lot of work on other areas. So they've looked at like general authority salaries, they've looked at the BYU systems tithing subsidies, they've looked at an estimate. This is really cool. An estimate of tithe paying membership based on different countries that have to disclose tithing that's coming into that country.

Spencer Anderson [00:06:48] And they've looked over time to see whether tithe paying membership is declining or going up. They've provided a map of the church's real estate in the United States and where it ranks in each state in terms of real estate owned. And they just keep giving periodic updates as new disclosures come out, like the 13F filings for Ensign Peak.

Spencer Anderson [00:07:10] So you've got a lot of stuff there and all of the sources are listed on the bottom of the page. So you can go back and you can kind of see what information they're getting. Every single thing that they do. You could recreate yourself. And that's what's another thing that's pretty great about what they're doing.

John Dehlin [00:07:25] I love it. All right, well, shout out to the team and thanks again, Spencer, for joining us. Also joining us today back on Mormon Stories, coming to Sunstone next week is the Radio Free Mormon from Radio Free Mormon Podcast, winner of four Boomer Awards.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:07:45] For what? For what awards?

John Dehlin [00:07:47] It says Boomer right there in your, in your title.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:07:50] Someone's been tampering with the names Again, thank you so much, whoever did that.

John Dehlin [00:07:56] Rfm, how are you?

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:07:58] I'm doing great. I'm doing great. Thank you. And I was paying close attention to what Spencer was saying. I have never before in my life heard the words really excited and accounting issues in the same sentence. So I'm excited to hear, I'm excited to hear what Spencer has for us today.

John Dehlin [00:08:14] And yet here we are. All right, and please check out a Radio Free Mormon podcast and Mormonism Live every Wednesday at 6:20pm Mountain Time on YouTube. They do great work. Also joining us back again is the Rebecca Bibliotheca Hello, John.

Radio Free Mormon [00:08:32] How are you this morning?

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:08:33] Good.

John Dehlin [00:08:33] Rebecca, tell people what the good work you do really quick.

Radio Free Mormon [00:08:37] Oh my goodness. Well, I have a Mormon ish podcast. We just dropped a really interesting episode this morning if you want to check it out. And I'm also still running the Good Book Club where we're reading like crazy. So. And I'm excited to be here this morning. I have to say that I was thinking about. You're talking about the article in the Tribune. It seems like every week there's something about church finance, which that was not a thing several years ago. So you know your podcast, other podcasts, widows might keeping everybody on their toes because it's out there. The news is getting out.

John Dehlin [00:09:05] Absolutely. All right. Well, it's great to have you, Rebecca. And let's go ahead, Spencer, let's dive in to page one and we're going to try and minimize our commentary today.

Clarifying Ensign Peak Employee Misconceptions

Spencer Anderson [00:09:16] Yeah. Let me kind of clarify just one thing from last time, if it's okay. Yeah. I saw some Facebook comments that stated that Enzyme Peak employees weren't doing a good job at their jobs. This was on one of your Facebook pages, John. And this is because of last time when we talked about how Enzyme Peaks returns were underperforming relative to the S&P 500. And I think that's the wrong conclusion to take. So I just want to clarify what I said in the last episode. I was not meaning to convey that Enzyme Peak is getting poor financial analysts, financial analysts that aren't good at what they do at Enzyme Peak.

Spencer Anderson [00:09:54] Instead, if these employees are anything like some of my academic friends that are affiliated with the church, they're hard working, they're efficient, they're savvy in their field of expertise. And the only issue is that they exist in a system where the incentive structure is such that they're going to have a really hard time competing with the market overall.

Spencer Anderson [00:10:15] It's more they don't put in as many hours. They aren't asked to put in as many hours. That's part of the utility function of working there. And, and so I just wanted to kind of clarify that it's not Ensign Peaks workers that are doing a poor job. It's just that the system is set up in such a way that they're going to have a really, really hard time beating the S&P 500, which is already a hard thing to do for nowadays for funds.

John Dehlin [00:10:43] So, yeah, I've often wondered why the why Ensign Peak didn't just decide to invest in the S&P 500. Some sort of indexed fund and really simplify. But I guess there are good reasons why they would want to disperse their risk over lots of different types of vehicles. But that's something that I wondered.

Spencer Anderson [00:11:05] Yeah. So, I mean, I think that we've seen that they try and avoid certain stocks. Right. And so. But they could, they could have created their own, even not an S&P 500 fund. They could have just created their own fund that is like a Mormon friendly fund that doesn't have certain companies to invest in. And then they could just set it and forget it. They could have just done that and, you know, revisit it every year or something like that. And maybe they will in the future, you know, after some of this information has come out. And that would be interesting to see. Yeah.

Historical Context of Church Humanitarian Giving

John Dehlin [00:11:38] All right. Well, do you want to. Spencer? I'm not sure I saw this and maybe it's in the slides, but I do think it's important that we frame sort of like historically how little the church seemed to report its humanitarian contributions. The small dollar amount that was reported for decades and decades and then the dramatic change and what, you know, the timing of that change. Do you want to provide any of that history? I didn't see it in the slides, but maybe I missed it.

Spencer Anderson [00:12:08] Yeah. I mean, most of the giving that's been given by the church started, they always refer back to 1985. Okay. So when they talk about their humanitarian efforts, a lot of times they say total assistance provided since 1985. And that's because they kind of started tracking their humanitarian efforts, it appears, when the church raised fast, offering funds to help support some to provide famine relief in Ethiopia back in 1985. And then since then, they've been tracking things to some extent. I don't know how well they've been doing it. In 1996, the church started an auxiliary called LDS Charities. And that was when that. That charity was kind of assigned and charged with the humanitarian aid aspect of church giving.

Spencer Anderson [00:12:56] So not fast offerings, not church welfare, but external giving for humanitarian aid purposes. And I think intuitively as members, we already understand that there's a difference between humanitarian aid and church welfare, because on our tithing slip, there's a line for fast offerings, and then there's a line for humanitarian aid. And so I think that for those of us who grew up in the church, we already kind of distinguished between those two pretty well. And operationally, it seems like the church was also distinguishing between those two as well. So LDS Charities was an organization completely dedicated to dispersing the funds that came from that line on the tithing slip that said humanitarian aid.

Spencer Anderson [00:13:44] And during that time, I mean, it didn't seem like the church was publicizing very much, but it also didn't seem like the church was doing. Doing very much back in the 1990s. And things have since ramped up. You also have social media that allows them to kind of. That allows these things to kind of seem like they're more prevalent than they were back then. But I think you could go back. Does that answer your question, John? You could go back to 1985.

John Dehlin [00:14:10] Wasn't there a quote by Oaks or someone, and maybe RFM or Rebecca will remember this. They basically said, we've given a billion dollars over, like 30 years. And then someone did the math to show that it was like, I don't know, $20 million a year. Some super low number. Do you know what I'm talking about? Anyone on the panel? Am I making this up?

Spencer Anderson [00:14:31] Yeah. In all of its reporting, the LDS Charities would give this total assistance, cumulative total assistance number. And this metric includes cash given as well as goods given. So food and clothing, as well as volunteer service hours, all for humanitarian aid purposes. And the report that they gave was that since 1985, we've given. It was back in like 2012, I think we've given 1.1 billion or something like that.

Spencer Anderson [00:15:03] In 2011, it was more than 1.4 billion is what I have here. And that was the number that was reported. But then when you divide that up, like you said, John, on a per year basis, it only ends up being something like 40 million a year given.

Spencer Anderson [00:15:21] And even if you update it back to 2022, it gets. It comes to something like 70 million a year in humanitarian aid given. And that's not even cash. That's cash plus the value of the clothing and food given, plus volunteer service hours, the value of those service hours.

Spencer Anderson [00:15:41] And so it's not even clear, like, how much cash they've given in the widow's. My estimate. And we'll talk about this in a minute, it's less than a billion. A little bit less than a billion given since 1985 in cash. So in 37 years, they still haven't given a billion in cash in. In humanitarian aid.

John Dehlin [00:16:02] Okay. Yeah. And we're getting lots of comments in, you know, in. In the livestream, Richard writes 40 million a year for 40 years. Suddenly it grows overnight to a billion. Gerardo is also providing some links as well that people should check out, including a link to a Deseret news article and which is the source. So thanks for our live stream. And, and, and again, Spencer, when was the year where all of a sudden it jumps to a billion in a year? Just so people know, like, and, and, you know, of course, we could speculate on the timing of that jump.

Spencer Anderson [00:16:36] Right? Yeah. It was in. So in 2020, they sort of like hinted at that they were going to do this, and then in 2021 is when they started reporting. They mixed together all of the fast offering and welfare with humanitarian aid, and the number jumps to what suddenly went to like 960 billion. I have it here.

John Dehlin [00:16:58] Million, right.

Spencer Anderson [00:16:59] Oh, 960 million. Thank you. Yeah, 906 million. That's what it was.

John Dehlin [00:17:03] Okay, so like 40 million for 30 or 40 years. Ensign Peak leaks come all of a sudden, everybody knows the church has over $100 billion in just reserve assets. And then almost soon thereafter, all of a sudden, the church is my reporting almost a billion dollars in a single year in contributions, which a lot of people have just wondered. And that's what today's about, right?

Spencer Anderson [00:17:30] Yeah, that's what's great about today. And it's kind of fun. We're in this, like, weird, unique setting where as an accountant, I like it because when we were talking about 13F stuff and Ensign Peak, there's almost nothing to go off of. And now we have annual reports that are given by this volunteer, voluntarily disclosed by LDS Charities. But it's. It's really bad accounting. And so it's kind of fun. And I think the widows, my team, had hopefully some fun with it. It's like Sudoku on steroids. It's like you're trying to kind of based on what they do give you. You're trying to fill in the blanks and fill in the gaps and provide a better estimate of what the church should have provided to the public in terms of what it's giving in the first place.

John Dehlin [00:18:13] So. Any other. Anything else before we jump into the slides?

How Much Tithing Goes to Humanitarian Aid

Spencer Anderson [00:18:17] Nope. Let's do it.

John Dehlin [00:18:18] All right, so here's the first slide.

Spencer Anderson [00:18:21] So. Yeah, so one of the things that is interesting to know, I think, for people who aren't don't grow up Mormon, is that most of the funds that are given, in fact, all of the funds that we can see that are given up until 2022, that are given for church welfare or for humanitarian aid purposes, are passed through by donations that are given by members above and beyond what they give in tithing.

Spencer Anderson [00:18:49] So it's not that the church takes any tithing and uses it for any Humanitarian aid or welfare purposes. Instead, church members are giving more above and beyond that and then it's getting sent to the, to, you know, help people in starving in other sorts of ways. Right. So, um, so, and I guess kind of to simplify this, neither tithing or the investment returns from enzyme peak are used for humanitarian purposes.

Spencer Anderson [00:19:19] Historically, that's the way it's always been. And so when people say like, oh well, the tithing goes to do good, it's like, well, this is not. It depends on what you would want to define as good. Instead, what's going on is members are generously giving money when they donate to fast offerings and those help. Those fast offerings help people that are the inside of the church who struggle financially. Or you could give to LDS Charities, or you could give in those giving machines, the light the world giving machines that happen every December now. Or you could use the humanitarian aid line on your tithing slip and all of that money goes through and then gets distributed as, as giving by the church.

Spencer Anderson [00:20:01] And so LDS Charities, like I said before, it's an auxiliary of the church and it uses the money for humanitarian aid purposes, whereas fast offerings are used for internal welfare purposes. I guess one of the good things about this is that if you do donate to one of these line items, if you do donate to fast offerings, or if you do donate to humanitarian aid, that line on the tithing slip, it does appear that every dollar that's donated gets used for its intended purpose in this one respect. And so that's, I think that that's a positive that I think should be highlighted. The church uses it as a pass through to kind of, and just sends it out.

LDS Charities Structure and Guiding Principles

Spencer Anderson [00:20:44] So we could go to the next slide if you want. And in one of the, let's see, LDS Charities has provided an annual report for a while and in its 2018 report it gave three guiding principles that I thought were really interesting that drive their efforts.

Spencer Anderson [00:21:05] The first principle that they say that they have is to care for those that are in the greatest need. So this I think sounds a lot like effective altruism for those of you who are familiar with this movement.

Spencer Anderson [00:21:17] The second principle is to promote volunteerism, which I think the church does very well, um, to you know, take all of the membership and have them volunteer and do things for free and then to inspire self reliance. And so those are the. I think it's important to kind of think of this at a high level. Like what is it that's guiding them as they go through, as they decide what projects they're going to engage in as they decide whether they're going to give or not give.

Spencer Anderson [00:21:44] These are their three guiding principles, according to them, so we could go to the next slide. And in another one of its reports, it gave 10 of its most focused on initiatives. And I thought that these were also really interesting for those, for the audience to think about. So it's 10 most focused on initiatives were food security, clean water, the international community, meaning empowering international communities so that they can address their own needs, emergency response, immunization, maternal and newborn care, refugee response, vision care, wheelchairs, and the US and Canadian community. Specifically, they focus on that because I think they have the infrastructure there to focus on those communities in particular.

Spencer Anderson [00:22:34] Then it has various charity partners that it teams up with in these projects. A lot of times what the church will do is instead of trying to directly give aid, it will give money, cash donation to these charity partners. And I think that this is probably a good thing because they probably have the resources to do a better job than the church could do in a lot of these efforts. So those include the World Food Program, the Rama Relief foundation, unicef, Convoy of Hope Care, Real Medicine Foundation, International Rescue Committee, Save the Children, Adventist Development and Relief Agency, the UN Refugee Agency, and Catholic Religion Relief Services.

Spencer Anderson [00:23:16] And they, they claim to have something like 2,000 charity partners. Those are just the ones that were listed on the, on the page. But this is kind of like the, this is kind of the high level stuff that's offered by the church and its reports.

John Dehlin [00:23:33] Right now, as I'm looking over that list, I'm thinking of like the Bible and Jesus. Jesus was all about feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the widows, the blind will see, the lame will walk. I guess I'm just seeing a lot of biblical Christianity in the areas that they, they've chosen, which I guess is a good thing.

Spencer Anderson [00:24:02] Yeah, this is like in, this is something I think everybody can get behind if you're a secular humanist. This is, these are all great initiatives that you can get behind. And, and I think that Jesus, the Jesus that I believe that I used to believe in, would approve.

John Dehlin [00:24:18] Yeah.

Spencer Anderson [00:24:18] In this.

John Dehlin [00:24:19] Yeah. Okay. All right. Anything else about that slide?

Spencer Anderson [00:24:25] No, let's keep going.

John Dehlin [00:24:26] Okay.

Spencer Anderson [00:24:27] So one thing that's kind of interesting, and this is what, this excites me as an accountant, but it also probably makes a lot of people frustrated, is that when you go to these annual reports that the church puts out, they're very glossy, they're very high in marketing.

Spencer Anderson [00:24:44] It's more of like a marketing production than it is an accounting Production. And there's a lot of fluff and vagary in terms of what the church is actually doing. And like I said, that's a lot better than we get with the ensign peak, which doesn't say almost anything about itself.

Spencer Anderson [00:25:00] But because the church is voluntarily reporting, it has a strong incentive to put itself in the best light possible. So you have to wade through all of that to get an accurate picture of what the church is doing in this area.

Spencer Anderson [00:25:13] And what the church is doing in this area in terms of reporting is very much an anomaly among charities and religious charities. So any respectable charity is going to provide some standardized financial reports that are, you know, standardized year over year so that you can compare from one year to the next. And they'll have key financial metrics.

Spencer Anderson [00:25:37] And so non religious charities, they provide them and they have to provide them because they have a Form 990 that they have to fill out for IRS purposes. But even the religious charities that don't have to fill out a Form 990 to the IRS, they still provide them. And those metrics would include, on a per year basis, they would include donations, grants, income, charitable service expenses, their administrative and fundraising costs, their capital reserves, their total assets and liabilities. When we talk about fund accounting, a lot of times you have funds that are earmarked for certain purposes and then you have a general fund that maybe goes towards helping with administrative expenses and things like that.

Spencer Anderson [00:26:21] And all of those things, basically it's a, it's a balance sheet and income statement in general is the non profit equivalent of that is provided. And the church refuses to provide any of that except when it's required to do so with its Australian entity, which we could talk about later.

Spencer Anderson [00:26:41] And so the Widow's Might team has really had to run through and wade through all of these prior reports dating back to 2004 in an attempt to kind of piece together like a puzzle what they, what they can about what the church's efforts are. And, and so anyway, that's a broad overview of the setting that we're in today.

John Dehlin [00:27:02] As an accounting professional. Is that a red flag? I mean, is that just a sign that the church is trying to get us ducks in a row? It's newer to the humanitarian biz and so it's probably not ready to start financial transparency, is it possible that it's just because it's new to the game, or is it because it's likely trying to hide something or do something dishonest? And then finally, is all of that kind of a red flag? For an accounting professional, I think that

Spencer Anderson [00:27:30] you can think of accounting in two ways, like reporting in general. One is an information perspective where you're trying to communicate accurately the economics of what is going on. And then a second perspective is that you are trying to get the people that are reading your reports to look at you in a favorable light. And so you manipulate the statistics. You only offer certain metrics that might prove. That might allow the, in this case, the church to be seen in a positive light. In a corporation, it would be something where maybe you would manipulate, manipulate or massage your earnings. And so the CEO hits the target for his bonus or something like that.

Spencer Anderson [00:28:11] And so you have those two perspectives. And usually in accounting, what happens is you have some sort of regulatory mechanism, whether it's an audit or the SEC stepping in in order to make sure that the information perspective of accounting is provided and not the. Not the nefarious perspective where you're just trying to present things in a biased light. And so what I see from the church is just a completely biased report where only the most positive things are going to be highlighted in the most positive formatting, in the most positive rhetoric. And so then it becomes very misleading. And I wouldn't put a lot of confidence on around the numbers that are provided if I can't verify them personally.

Spencer Anderson [00:29:05] And so that's. That's a, That's a major concern. So I think it's. It has nothing to do, in my opinion, with them being novices and at least with its main reports. It's had 10 years of doing this, these reports, and it's a billion dollar. It has billions and billions of dollars. It could easily hire a financial reporting expert to do this, but this is more of a refusal, probably from the top, to be transparent.

Limited Transparency in Church Reporting

John Dehlin [00:29:35] All right. And Rebecca and nrfm, I invite y' all to jump in anytime you have any thoughts or comments. I'll take your silences that you don't have anything to say, but I hope you feel welcome as a panel to jump in.

Radio Free Mormon [00:29:49] I do have a comment very quickly about that. I feel that the membership is very satisfied with limited information. I feel like they just sort of say, okay, I trust it's fine, and they're okay. Not digging any deeper. I think that's part of it. No one is really demanding any of these answers or this transparency. They're very content just to take what is said at face value. I don't know if the rest of you feel that way, but I kind of feel that's the, that's the overall

John Dehlin [00:30:13] feeling A lot of trust.

Radio Free Mormon [00:30:16] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:30:18] Okay. RFM and Rebecca, please jump in because I don't want to have to ask every slide if you want to comment. So please comment when you. When you feel like you'd like to. Should we jump to the next slide, Spencer?

Spencer Anderson [00:30:28] Sure. Yeah. So here are some. Here's an example of some of the more qualitative metrics that the Church provides in terms of its giving. So, for example, it provides a metric for projects which has steadily grown from 2016 to 2020, as you can see on the graphic if you're watching, it provides a metric for countries that are receiving aid, which bumped up pretty substantially to nearly 200 countries receiving aid from the church in 2021. And it discloses the number of charity partners which it works with, which appears to be rising very slightly over time. And the issue with these kind of metrics is we have no context whatsoever to picture what these metrics even mean.

Spencer Anderson [00:31:12] So, like, for example, what defines the boundaries of a project when it says that there are 3,000 projects going on by the church? What does that even mean? How big are these projects? How do they decide when a country is receiving aid? If I sent a dollar to 200 different charities in 200 different countries, would the church define that as me giving aid to those countries?

Spencer Anderson [00:31:38] You know, is there a threshold in terms of what is material here? And these kind of metrics, the problem with them is they have this grandiose appearance, but they lack any real way to visualize the efforts behind them. And that makes it hard for me as an accountant, the church appears to favor, in this case, like, marketing over accounting in its reports, which makes it much less informative.

Spencer Anderson [00:32:02] And I think from the membership perspective, these are the things that maybe they latch onto. They see the line going up, they see the trend, and maybe the trend is positive, but it's really hard to grasp, like, what is the economic significance of what the church is doing here. And so, yeah, that's all I got for this slide.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:32:21] Okay, Spencer, I've got a question.

Spencer Anderson [00:32:24] Yeah.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:32:24] Is there any attempt of the church in your mind to make it look like when they list their number of projects, that these are kind of being run by the church as opposed to being only perhaps partially supported by the church?

Spencer Anderson [00:32:38] Yeah, I'm glad that you brought this up. So widows might has had a hard time trying to disentangle, like, for example, volunteer hours reported or projects reported. So, for example, one of the examples by one of the widow team that they gave me, and I have it right here, I'm Going to even open it up is.

Spencer Anderson [00:33:00] Let's see, they said the question I could never resolve relates to how they count volunteerism for actual humanitarian purposes. So, for example, if they send out 12 volunteers door to door to encourage immunizations or educate people for four hours each, that's 48 hours. But do they then count those hours spent by the local agencies who carry out the immunization clinics? Are they taking credit for the entire program or not? And so sometimes it might seem like these projects, if they're just partially involved, they could count it as one of their projects, even though they are playing very, very.

Spencer Anderson [00:33:40] And this is why these things are so heavily manipulated, that it's. I'm. I'm not really trusting in these metrics very, very much at all. Does that answer your question? Rfm?

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:33:51] Yeah, I think that you're holding it out. It's a definite possibility that they're just trying to inflate or report these large number of projects that they're involved in, when actually it could be very minimal amounts for. Well, it could be minimal amounts for all of them or different amounts for. For each. But the idea is that when they report these projects, the impression that I get and that I think they're trying to give is that they are either fully funding these projects, they're running the projects, they're all in on these projects, when, as you say, they could just be sending out a few volunteers and then saying, this is a project that we are involved in, or a country,

John Dehlin [00:34:31] or a country that we're now involved in. And not to speculate too much, but it's almost like, oh, no, now, now the world's eyes are on us about humanitarian efforts. We need. We can't do full legitimate financial accounting or reporting, but we want to provide some data or graphs or charts to create the impression of growth and, and maybe the. The impression of accountability.

John Dehlin [00:34:57] So let's, let's produce some visuals like this that appear to be saying something significant, but maybe aren't. While we're giving Spencer a chance to get his microphone going, I guess I want to ask Rebecca and rfm. One of the things that's tricky about this, this whole process is on the one hand, we, as people who are skeptical of Mormonism or critical of the Mormon Church, have been frustrated for years that the church isn't really using its surplus money to help the poor and the needy. So we're critical of that. We're critical of kind of a Wall street mentality.

John Dehlin [00:35:49] On the other hand, now it seems like they're Getting into the game, even though they've been shamed to get into the game. But then when they start trying to get in the game, then it's almost like we, we sometimes feel like we want to be critical instead of encouraging. Rebecca and rfm, do you guys ever find yourself struggling how much you want to criticize them, getting in the game and being skeptical versus being grateful and encouraging?

Radio Free Mormon [00:36:20] I feel that way. I sort of feel too little too late. You know what I mean? That kind of attitude. But then, like you said, I'm conflicted because they are slowly starting to do some good with this incredible wealth and these incredible resources, so. Agreed. I do sometimes have to check myself and when I go on different podcasts or different, you know, Mormon news watch programs, I do try to also bring out the positive that's happening. But in the back of my mind, you're right, it's still sort of like, yeah, but would you have done it if it weren't for David Nelson or. You know what I mean? That's kind of how I feel.

Spencer Anderson [00:36:51] What do you guys think?

John Dehlin [00:36:52] Rfm, what do you think?

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:36:54] Well, I think part of my skepticism. First off, let me answer your question and say I am totally behind all the good that the church does. And I think there's plenty of good things that the church does and I want to support and applaud them and all those things. On the other hand, we, when they go from 40 million a year in charitable giving on the average, like you talked about, and then suddenly it goes up to 906 million, which is around 23 times more per year that they report.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:37:23] I think it was the widow's mite who did the analysis and figured out that actually they didn't change their giving. What they changed was their method of reporting, because up to that, they'd been looking at the charitable giving over here and it's 40 million a year. And then over here on the other side in another report, they talk about the amount of fast offerings. Right.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:37:44] Which is a large amount, of course, when you look at it as church wide. And so some genius in church administration had the idea, I know how we can make it look like we're giving a lot more without giving another dime. And that is, we'll take the fast offerings amount and bring it over here into this column and add it to the 40 million a year. And lo and behold, now we can report 906 million a year instead of 40 million a year.

John Dehlin [00:38:10] Yeah. I guess what we can do is either ask either of you if you have any More thoughts you want to share? I want to ask our audience to please forgive us for this. And of course we want to share and welcome any questions or comments that people have. And we are willing to share those as kind of a free form audience participation while we're waiting.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:38:36] Yeah, I just want to say how thrilled I am that the problem isn't on my end for a change.

John Dehlin [00:38:42] Are you saying, does this happen on Mormonism Live every once in a while? Radio Free Mormon?

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:38:46] Well, there's a reason we regularly get started a few minutes late, really quickly.

John Dehlin [00:38:52] Why don't you tell us while we're here? Sunstone's coming up next week. Sunstone is a really important event for Mormonism and I believe rfm. You're speaking at Sunstone, so why don't we do a public service announcement and give you a chance to tell the audience why you're going to Sunstone and what it is you're talking about there.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:39:12] Well, I'll be going to Sunstone. I'll be presenting on Saturday afternoon at 2:30, I think right before Randall Bell is going to be talking about this Dartmouth connection. You know about that, don't you, John?

John Dehlin [00:39:23] I think we covered that a little bit on Mormon stories. Yeah.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:39:26] Yeah. Why don't you tell us about that? I'm just, I'm going to be talking about something that's very simple, straightforward, easy to understand, which means it's perfect for me. But I think it's very important when it has to do with Dating Section 132, which is the title of the presentation, Dating Section 132. And I think that we can show through using the three affidavits that were published in the Nauvoo Expositor, the one and only issue on June 7, 1844, that we can use those affidavits in order to demonstrate that a document that was in all material respects similar to, if not identical to section 132 as we have it today existed in Joseph Smith's lifetime.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:40:08] And a lot of people go, well, so. So what? That's not important. The only reason that it's important is not just as a theoretical historical issue, but it's because there's a growing number of people who are latching on to this idea that Joseph Smith did not practice polygamy and that he certainly did not teach or receive section 132 in the doctrine and Covenants that this is something that was ginned up after his death by Brigham Young.

Spencer Anderson [00:40:38] Young.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:40:39] And then Brigham Young brought it forward and said, hey, look at this revelation that Joseph Smith received. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. So it's this whole idea of a conspiracy where Brigham Young comes up with section 132, say in 1852, eight years after Joseph Smith is gone, and says, this is something that Joseph Smith received in order to date his plural marriage practices. Brigham Young's plural marriage practices says back to Joseph Smith.

John Dehlin [00:41:09] I love it. That's exciting. Rfm. I wish I could be there. I'm going to be out of town, but maybe you'll come on Mormon Stories and share that. That research as well.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:41:19] I would love to do that. Next Wednesday at 3, your studio.

John Dehlin [00:41:23] Are you saying we already have that planned?

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:41:25] Yeah, and it's going to be a lot of fun. I'll be a little bit more limited in my time in Sunstone with Mormon Stories. Maybe we'll have a little bit more time. Can take a few questions from the audience if they have any questions about it. Rebecca, what do you think about this research?

Radio Free Mormon [00:41:40] Well, I was gonna say you're being a little too modest because this is absolutely a smoking gun, section 132. And we actually got to have RFM on Mormon ish. And he kind of beta tested out this presentation, and it's incredible. So please watch it on Mormon's Stories next Wednesday. And if you're at Sunstone, please attend because it's. It's really interesting and really well put together.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:42:06] Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that.

Total Humanitarian Assistance Since 1985

Spencer Anderson [00:42:10] So, yeah, so this slide is kind of showing. You know, before we were talking about kind of the qualitative metrics that didn't really mean a lot. And this is getting a little closer to something with a semblance of monetary value assigned to it. And this is what we were talking about before when we said that the church has offered this metric of total, total assistance.

Spencer Anderson [00:42:29] And what that metric represents is cash, goods and services, which is likely clothing, food, and volunteer hours since 1985. And this metric does not include fast offerings. It's just humanitarian aid. And the church, back in 2004-2009, they used to split that out, the cash part of those goods from the goods and services part. But then after 2009, they just stopped doing that.

Spencer Anderson [00:42:56] And what the widows might team estimated for 2021 and 2022 was that roughly 947 million had been given in cash since 1985, and almost 2 billion in goods and services slash volunteer hours. And so what's really cool about this estimate? So widows might have to come in and the. The church isn't Providing this, they're not splitting up cash versus non cash. The church had to kind of do that or, sorry, the widow's mite team had to try and do that. And they didn't even know. The widow's might team didn't know that these 2004-2009 reports existed. And so it was really cool. Afterwards, after they'd already created this estimate, they found these 2004 to 2009 excerpts.

Spencer Anderson [00:43:45] I think one of the, one of the listeners or somebody who follows widow's Might shared it with them, and they were able to go back and see if those reconcile. And they reconciled really well. So it was just another one of those instances where their estimates have been vindicated by actual data after they'd already put it together.

Spencer Anderson [00:44:08] And so let me see what else is in this that's interesting. From 2004 to 2016, the church was giving roughly 96 million per year in cash, goods and services for humanitarian purposes. That's just for those years, not going back to 1985. And then in 2017, it went up to 180 million. And then it went back down a little bit. From 2018 to 2020, it went closer to 150 million a year. And then in 2022, it really ramped up to around 265 million per year.

Spencer Anderson [00:44:45] Now, remember that this isn't just cash. This is also volunteer hours included and things like that. But that was a really big increase in reported giving. And so we're talking about an average, if we were to go all the way back to 1985 to 2022, we're talking about an average of about 70 million per year in cash services and goods given for humanitarian purposes over 37 years.

Spencer Anderson [00:45:13] So keep in mind that, you know that as a total metric, this has been like 200 million per year at most. And then all of a sudden, as you, as you've already alluded to, John, in 2021, all of a sudden, the church provides this huge number of nearly a billion given in aid.

Spencer Anderson [00:45:34] And so they started, you know, in other words, it was, if you were a member, you would think that this was an amazing increase of something like 40 times, 50 times the amount that used to be given. And as RFM pointed out, I think earlier he said that, you know, it wasn't really that they were giving more. It was just that their reporting changed. And so that's what we'll talk about next. But I don't know if anybody had any comments on this one.

John Dehlin [00:46:04] All right, let's go to the next slide.

Spencer Anderson [00:46:07] Okay. So all of a sudden, starting in 2021, they started. The church started lumping together not just the humanitarian aid that was given, but also internal church welfare and service that was provided. And that includes a whole lot of things. And we'll talk a little bit about what that means, what. What's included in that and why that's problematic.

Spencer Anderson [00:46:28] But there was no. There was no separation of these two. It was like all of a sudden they had been. It was. They acted as though they had been providing this number all along. And from an accounting perspective, this is really poor accounting quality. When you want really high accounting quality, you want to have what's called comparability. You want to be able to compare the one year to the next and the next year to your forecast for the next year. And you can't do that because in 2021, suddenly everything was obfuscated by this. This lumping together of.

Spencer Anderson [00:47:02] Of two different activities. And we know that they're different functionally because different entities were. Were operating behind the scenes, directing these different activities. But they decided to lump them together into the report. And in. This is kind of an accounting trick called classifications shifting. And so it's basically where you take one activity and then after. In one year, you decide to lump it into another category and kind of hide it, the activity in that way.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:47:33] Spencer, can I ask you a question?

Spencer Anderson [00:47:35] Yeah.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:47:36] In the activities section, if we get the slide back up, if that's okay, because that's what I'm referring to on the activities section, on the right in the middle. And if you follow that all the way down, these are things that they're counting in this new metric. Is that correct?

Spencer Anderson [00:47:50] Correct. Yep. And these are all things that are included in the. Yeah, the welfare portion. That, that first list right there, it

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:47:57] says proselyting missionary service hours. That's included.

Spencer Anderson [00:48:03] That's right. So if you're a proselyting missionary and you have service hours for a week or something, let's say you. I don't know how they would estimate it. So two hours of service for the week or something like that, then they would include that as part of church humanitarian efforts. They're giving, I guess, their overall giving metric.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:48:26] Well, with that many missionaries, I know they split them up into twos when they go out, but with that many missionaries, even a couple hours a week could end up being a large number.

Spencer Anderson [00:48:34] That's right. The one that really frustrates me on this slide. So, I mean, maybe we should go through it, but it includes fast offering assistance which is absolutely fantastic. Farms and bishop storehouses. Perpetual education fund, Employment resources, Church family services. So you know, counseling that might be provided. Self reliance groups, Deseret industries, Transitional services, Youth service projects. Here's the one that really bothers me. Church facility volunteering. Does anybody know what that might be?

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:49:10] You mean they're counting it when I go in on Saturday morning and wash the bathrooms at the church and clean up?

Spencer Anderson [00:49:15] Yeah. So that church facility volunteering is just the members cleaning the church. They're counting that as church giving. And the reason why it's so weird to me and kind of funny is that the church is the beneficiary in this scenario. The church is not the one that's giving. Right. So instead of paying people to clean its facilities, the church is having members do it for free. And then claiming that this is the church giving it would be like, you know, even though it's their buildings that are getting cleaned, they're the beneficiary. It would be like Walmart asking people to volunteer to be cashier and then claiming that it was a charitable effort of Walmart for people to do so.

Spencer Anderson [00:49:55] And it just is, it's a weird, I think that this exists in the church a lot where service only exists to serve the church. Like the need for the service isn't already there. The church creates the need for the service. So you think that you're serving by, you know, helping in a calling or you think that you're serving because you're cleaning the church building. But it's really the churches that is like creating the service opportunity.

Radio Free Mormon [00:50:25] Do you know Spencer, if they count 10 temple cleaning in that. I just got an email the other day asking me to go clean the temple by my house.

Spencer Anderson [00:50:33] Yeah, there's a. Yeah, it would, I think and so it would also include things like going to the cannery and things like that. But. But yeah, the temple cleaning would also be included there.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:50:43] So Spencer, do you know how much money I'm not making an hour when I'm cleaning the church?

Spencer Anderson [00:50:50] I do not know what number they used by which.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:50:53] Of course, what I'm saying is, do you know what. How much an hour they're counting, Counting for every hour of service work in all these different categories. Is it like minimum wage or. And if it is minimum wage where federal. It would seem easy. I mean they could give a raise to everybody that they would never see and just say 50 or 100 bucks an hour and they could pump up the numbers that way too.

Spencer Anderson [00:51:15] Yeah, it was here somewhere. I can't Remember, if it was the church that provided it or if it's just widow's mite, that's kind of estimating it out on the back end. So shoot me a text. Widow's might if you, if you have the answer to that, but I can't. I can't find it. Right.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:51:31] You know what my guess is, right? My guess is the church has not provided it.

Spencer Anderson [00:51:36] Yeah, probably not. And if they did, you know, they would want to bump up the number.

John Dehlin [00:51:42] Yeah, really quickly. I'll just kind of echo what you're saying. Spencer, this is a bit outrageous. You know, you talked about how preposterous it is for them to count member volunteer hours of cleaning the chapels and temples. Missionary work is also preposterous. That would be like IBM sending out a sales force to sell their product and then counting the hours of their sales force as charitable giving. Because in essence, when the missionaries go out to convert people to Mormonism, tithing is, you know, tithing and volunteer service to the church are key components of what a missionary would be recruiting converts to do. And so to count missionary efforts as humanitarian effort, just. And even service missionaries, those of us

Spencer Anderson [00:52:44] who,

John Dehlin [00:52:46] in my experience participated in service efforts as a missionary will know that that was often done as a guise for, for conversion. And I don't mean to sound cynical. I'm just saying that was my experience is that service was a means to get converts, not an end unto itself in any of the service projects I was involved with as a missionary. And any of you on the panel are welcome to disagree with me, you know, if you want.

Radio Free Mormon [00:53:23] No, I completely agree with that. And having had two sons on a mission, I know that that's definitely a strategy. And of course you are helping people. There is service being provided. But in my personal anecdotal experience talking to my sons, they also want to leave a message. They also want to perhaps leave a prayer or lead a prayer, leave literature. So there is service. But they definitely hope that there'll be some interest sparked in attending a meeting or further dialogue about the church.

John Dehlin [00:53:50] And if you, and if you study any sort of high demand religion, whether it's Scientology or Jehovah's Witnesses or whatever, the on ramp to the religion is always some sort of service. In fact, another thing that Mormon missionaries would often do in, in, in international, you know, in other countries, is teach English as an entryway or as an on ramp on to missionary work. And so I guess I'm just saying the obvious, which is the church counting a lot of these categories Just feels problematic to me.

Spencer Anderson [00:54:27] Yeah. And I guess what you've highlighted, John, is like the, the need for them to separate out faith blind humanitarian giving versus this internal, and then also break it down by fast offerings and, you know, bishop storehouse stuff versus youth service projects and cleaning the church. Right. It's like they should split that out. They have those numbers. They created this metric, and so they should. They should break it down for us. And that's what, that's what a normal, you know, transparent organization would do is they would provide these things based on their activity levels, based on their sectors and, and the types of activities that are being done.

Spencer Anderson [00:55:11] And something that's interesting, too, and maybe this is why they don't do it. But the Widows, my team also did, and we don't. We don't have a slide for this, but they did an analysis on how much volunteer hours have changed given the reported number of volunteer hours over time.

Spencer Anderson [00:55:26] And they had to massage the data a little bit, but they found that there was no substantial change in volunteer hours provided by church members over the last 15 years. And with the growing church, I think you'd certainly expect that number to go up over time, especially with more opportunities to serve through. You know, there are new initiatives like JustServe.org or more service missionary opportunities than there used to be, things like that.

Spencer Anderson [00:55:54] It's telling, I think, that the number of volunteer hours as a whole have not gone up over 15 years. And I think maybe the church wouldn't want to report that. And so they figure that if we just combine all the. Everything together, all of the smaller elements, it gives us an opportunity when we pool them together to increase some numbers to offset some of the decreases that we see in other areas and make it look like everything's just fine.

John Dehlin [00:56:25] Yeah. Someone else wants us to remember that the missionaries are paying to be missionaries. So it's not even the church that's financially supporting the missionaries. It's the families of the missionary that are paying for the missionaries to then do what the church calls humanitarian work. It just feels like fuzzy math. Oh. The other point I just wanted to make is I used to work at a management consulting firm. I used to work at Bain, and.

John Dehlin [00:56:54] And I know for a fact that the Mormon Church has hired Bain Co. Historically to do management consulting. And I just want to say this type of graph and chart is the exact type of graph and chart that a management consultant would come up with. The church would get in a big room with a bunch of Harvard and Stanford MBAs and say, we've got this metrics, we've got this optics problem.

John Dehlin [00:57:23] We're losing goodwill because we're looking like a greedy corporate investment institution. We've gotta come up with some graphs and charts and some claims around humanitarian efforts, but we're not ready to give a billion dollars. What do we do? This sort of analysis, this sort of fuzzy charting and graphs is exactly what the church would hire a McKinsey Co.

John Dehlin [00:57:51] Or a monitor group or a Bain Co. To do because I, I did it for Bain, who, who again was, you know, had the Mormon Church as his client. And of course, we all know that Mitt Romney was one of the founders of Bain and Company. Okay, should we go to the next slide? Spencer?

Recent Giving Trends from 2021 to 2022

Spencer Anderson [00:58:08] Sure. So, I mean, for the next four slides or so, I think that we're going to refer to some of the most, the more recent trends between 2021 and 2022, which I think are positive trends. And so not all is bad. And I think that the church should get credit where it's due. And there's some really positive trending information here in terms of humanitarian aid that is given. And so widows, my team split out what the church should have done in the first place and split out an estimate of church welfare from the humanitarian aid component for 2021 and 2022 and found that they nearly doubled their humanitarian aid given.

Spencer Anderson [00:58:49] In particular, they doubled donations given to charity partners. And I think that that's a really important element. Pretty big deal, I think, because when the church gives to these charity partners, there's very little in terms of the ability to manipulate the numbers that the Church could do because you have some other person on the other end that is verifying the check. There's some paper trail.

Spencer Anderson [00:59:13] And so usually the number is actually provided in the church newsroom. They'll say we gave 20 million to UNICEF. And so you can sort of verify it. And then the money is also being used in a way that is less likely to be nefarious in purpose.

Spencer Anderson [00:59:30] Like you mentioned, John, it's, it can't easily be proselytizing disguised as charity as much as the other forms of aid could be used. Right? So if you're just giving 20 million to the, to good, to, to UNICEF and UNICEF takes that money and does something, there's never an indirect connection to the church when somebody receives aid. And so I think that's a big deal.

Spencer Anderson [00:59:59] And so as you can see, from 2021 to 2022, we had from anywhere between around 100 million in humanitarian aid given that year, and then it went up to almost 200 million in humanitarian aid. Given. Another thing that I know on this graph here is that when it comes to church welfare, so the church reported 2021, they've reported total giving to be 906 million, and then in 2022 to be 1.02 billion.

Spencer Anderson [01:00:34] And that's only when you break it out. It's only a 12.6% increase in church welfare, but it's a huge increase in humanitarian aid. And most of that welfare also was fast offering assistance, which I think is a good thing as well.

Spencer Anderson [01:00:51] Not as much. You know, the volunteer service hours might not be as easily placed into fast offering assistance as much as some of those other areas. So I don't know if there's anything else in those slides that look stood out to people, but the big thing here is that there's a big ramping up of humanitarian cash donations being given from 21, 2021 to 2022.

John Dehlin [01:01:19] Got it. Next slide.

Spencer Anderson [01:01:25] Yeah. So something that's really interesting about that is that widows mite came out with that doubling and came up with this slide saying, you know, they could be. We think that the church is on a trajectory to increase its giving substantially. It's. It's humanitarian aid giving. And then the widow's might report got vindicated once again. In the 60 Minutes episode that recently aired, Bishop Waddell said, and I found. I had his quote here, but then I had to get out of here. It'll take me just one second to find the quote.

Radio Free Mormon [01:02:13] No, Bishop.

Spencer Anderson [01:02:13] Bishop Waddell said, we will double the humanitarian work again. And then again. And this is after they had already doubled it once. And so if you double it, that's a. That's three doublings. And if that happened, we would see the range of what the church would be at in terms of giving on this slide here in 2024, four, we would be closer to.

Spencer Anderson [01:02:37] Let's see if we would be closer to like 500 million. And in giving in just cash given to other organizations so that they could then do charity work. And then if they doubled again in 2025, they would be over a billion. And so if the church commits to this, we could really see a huge effort being made by the church to actually do some real good here.

Spencer Anderson [01:03:02] I think that, you know, we tend to be. I tend to be pretty skeptical about what the church does at this, you know, at this initial juncture. I see it as baby steps. But if they were to double it year after year after year, it quickly becomes a very material, very substantial amount. It would only take a few years for that to happen.

John Dehlin [01:03:30] Do you want to have us go to the next slide, Spencer?

Spencer Anderson [01:03:32] Sure.

John Dehlin [01:03:33] Yeah.

Spencer Anderson [01:03:33] That's great. The other place where I think that credit should be given, I guess, in some sense, is that if you look at the last two years where the stock market performed really poorly, 2008, the S&P 500 went down by 37%.

Spencer Anderson [01:03:52] And the next worst year was after that was in 2022, when it went down by 20%. And this is what we would call a rainy day. Right. So this is what the church keeps talking about, I would think, in terms of a rainy day. And you would. It presents a problem for the church during a rainy day to give more because you have a demand that has gone up for more giving. There are more people that are financially struggling during these periods, and so the demand for more help is there, but at the same time, the church is losing money in its investments because the.

Spencer Anderson [01:04:27] Because of the rainy day that's occurring. So the rainy day is hitting the church as well. And so. So I feel like there. There is this impetus, this. This incentive for the church to retrench and to not give more when there is a rainy day, because they're also losing out on money.

Spencer Anderson [01:04:49] And that's exactly what we saw in 2008 in terms of cash given. I believe this is cash given. Yes. This is cash aid to other humanitarian programs. In 2008, they reduced their giving by 62% in the year when probably it was needed the most. And so obviously, you know, shame on the church for giving less in the time when it was needed the most. However, in 2022, you know, you've got to give the church credit. They increased.

Spencer Anderson [01:05:19] They're giving by. By almost double from 2021 to 2022, when times got a little more difficult in terms of the. If you were to use the stock market as a proxy for that. And so I thought. I think that's a. That's a good indicator that maybe things are moving in the right direction. At least things are much better in 2022 in terms of church giving than in 2008.

Spencer Anderson [01:05:44] And we can go to the next slide if you want. The other really positive development out of this is remember how at the beginning, I mentioned that tithing is never used for any of these funds. And so basically, the church gives what it gets from the generous contributions from members. And so some of this is sort of dictated by what the church is getting from that humanitarian aid line on the tithing slip. Well, in 2022, it seems to have broken off from that tradition.

Spencer Anderson [01:06:14] The widow's mite found that it looks as though that 96 million rise, that that doubling of humanitarian giving was actually coming from tithing. And this is the first time ever that it looks as though. It looks as though the church is using tithing funds to help fund humanitarian efforts. And, and that means that, you know, instead of giving, putting all of that excess tithing that they aren't using for operational purposes into Enzyme Peak, they're taking some of that out, in this case, about 10% first for humanitarian purposes, for charitable purposes, and then the other 90% still goes into Enzyme Peak.

Spencer Anderson [01:06:56] And I think this is a big deal in terms of crossing a board and an obstacle that the church has, a mental obstacle in terms of not being willing to give using tithing funds. And it might be that there's another.

Spencer Anderson [01:07:17] It might be that there's another obstacle that it could. That it could cross in terms of using its. Its investment funds as well, not just the tithing funds, but also the Ensign Peak funds and some. Some point in the future.

Spencer Anderson [01:07:29] So anyway, so it looks as though in this case, widows might has estimated that tithing funds were used in 2022 for humanitarian purposes. Does anybody have anything to comment? This is kind of all. These last slides are kind of the most positive developments that we've seen in the last few years.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:07:50] No one can hear me.

Spencer Anderson [01:07:52] Can you hear you now?

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:07:53] Oh, great. Thank you, John. Yeah. I wanted to know the difference between 2008, where their charitable giving went down, and then 2022, when charitable giving went up in spite of what the stock market was doing. Was there any difference between those two years in terms of the publicity the church was receiving?

Spencer Anderson [01:08:14] Yeah, you're really. I mean. Yeah, obviously. Right. So, I mean, I don't want to be too skeptical.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:08:21] I know you're trying to give the church credit. I'm just asking a question.

Spencer Anderson [01:08:24] The impetus behind it could definitely be and likely is a lot of the criticism that the church is facing. You know, most people didn't even know that the church was. There were no financial issues in the news really in 2008 for the church specifically.

Radio Free Mormon [01:08:45] So.

Spencer Anderson [01:08:45] Yes.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:08:45] Thank you. I have no further questions.

Spencer Anderson [01:08:51] That was a good. That was just like a lawyer. That was great. I am guilty. So the next few slides that we want to cover is kind of what could be if the church decided right now we know that they've tapped into tithing, the question is kind of what would happen? Is it possible that the church would tap into its investment, proper profits to accelerate its giving.

What the Church Could Do with Investment Profits

Spencer Anderson [01:09:14] And right now, you know, you have some of the 1 billion in surplus tithing that has been given to humanitarian aid efforts in 2022. That's about 100 million out of the 1 billion that they could have. And then there's also an additional 7 billion every year that they could give based on just the returns that they're getting from, on average, from their enzyme peak funds. And so it's interesting that they are giving substantially more, but at the same time, it's also true that they're giving almost nothing when you compare it to what they could give. And this is a really substantial, it's a really substantial point that I think that sometimes members or faithful members and former members talk across each other is about how good the church is doing and then how good the church is not doing and how much good it's not doing.

Spencer Anderson [01:10:08] And both of those things are simultaneously true. The church is doing a lot and is, is, has ramped up its, its giving, but it's also giving almost nothing compared to what it could give. And so it just depends on, I guess, the perspective you take. I think that both things should be acknowledged.

Spencer Anderson [01:10:27] And in the next slide, if you want to go to the next slide, this illustrates just how large the church would be as a charitable organization if they decided to use some of those investment profits as, as a, as a source of their charitable efforts. And so right now, if they decided to take their non. If they decided to take their surplus income from tithing and from their investments and they decided to use those for charity, they could give out around 9 billion per year, which would make it the second largest American charity in the world.

Spencer Anderson [01:11:06] American charity in America, I guess, the largest being Lutheran services in America, the next largest being United Way. They would double what the United Way gives every single year. And so you can see the potential there. I mean, there's just so much potential for what the church could do.

Spencer Anderson [01:11:24] And the church is, you know, just kind of. I think, you know, one of the members of the widow's mite team put it. Well, to me, they said it's not, it's not that the church hasn't solved world hunger or anything. It's just that it hasn't even tried. Like it has the potential to do it and it hasn't tried. That's what is so disappointing to this member of the widow's, my team.

Radio Free Mormon [01:11:47] Well, and if I can just comment, I feel even being skeptical, PR wise, there's nothing better can you imagine if they were one of the top charitable givers? Can you imagine the publicity the missionary tool that would be. There would be nothing like it. I, I just seriously can't understand why they can't see that. Even if they're only doing it for those reasons, they would still be doing it. It would be an incredibly positive influence all the way around. And everyone would know, oh, that's the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. They're a huge charitable powerhouse, but they don't do it. I don't. I don't understand why.

Spencer Anderson [01:12:24] Yeah, it's very strange to me, too. I think that that's their best option moving forward. Like, they could. They could expand. They would have more conversions. It's the best publicity that's out there. The next slide, it talks about, like, what you could do to help the hungry if you were to use some of that investment fund to.

Spencer Anderson [01:12:44] To help the. The hungry. So based on their analysis, and this is based on a cost of 25 cents per meal, which is actually what some of the larger organizations like Feeding America use for their estimates. If the church used its surplus tithing and investment income to feed the hungry, it could begin feeding three meals to 30 million people in 92 countries every day, for every year, forever.

Spencer Anderson [01:13:13] So 365 days a year, three meals a day for. To 30 million people. It could feed 30 million people forever with these funds. And so there's a huge. You know, people talk about, like, oh, well, they're saving this money for a rainy day, but there's a huge opportunity cost here. There are 30 million people that are going hungry today that don't need to be going hungry today. If the church would tap into these funds. And I think that that really has to weigh on our minds in terms of an ethical issue.

Spencer Anderson [01:13:45] We all face this issue to some extent with our own funds, with our own resources. You know, do I buy new Nike sneakers or do I save a life? There's. This is a. It's not an easy. It's a moral issue, but it's just compounded by a billion. When we're talking about the church's efforts here, especially when the church is claiming to represent Christ. And, and so I think that this is really a poignant example of, like, what the church could do in the next slide as well.

Spencer Anderson [01:14:20] You know, it might be. It might be worth questioning, you know, why the church doesn't do it. And I think, Rebecca, you don't understand, like, why. And I kind of feel the same way. The widows might Team kind of put out a couple of examples of why maybe the church is reluctant to give. And it has to do with this doctrine of self reliance.

Spencer Anderson [01:14:39] Because not only does self reliance govern how we should act as the, as how we live our personal lives, right? We should have food storage, we should, we should have an income, we should have a rainy day fund for ourselves. These are all things that we've been taught. But it also dictates whether we should give and when we should give.

Spencer Anderson [01:15:01] And so, for example, Ezra Taft Benson said, it is a law in heaven and one we haven't learned fully here on earth, that you cannot help people permanently by doing for them what they can do and should do for themselves.

Spencer Anderson [01:15:14] And then President Bram Young said, true charity consists of placing others in a situation in which they can support themselves. In some ways, these are positive statements. You know, don't give a man a fish versus teach a man to fish.

Spencer Anderson [01:15:33] But many members and some leaders, I think they're taken to mean that you shouldn't give direct aid because they should, because it's, it's stopping them from having the opportunity to help themselves. And whenever, you know, you have aid tied to righteousness, that compounds the issue as well. Right. And so are they deserving? Have they been righteous enough? Have they done the things that they need to do in order to receive God's blessing of receiving some of the sacred funds of the church?

Spencer Anderson [01:16:08] That mentality is still, I think, prevalent within the church. And it might inhibit their willingness to just freely give, regardless of who the receiver is. And hopefully, you know, we're seeing a trend away from that. So in the next slide, one comment

Radio Free Mormon [01:16:24] really quickly, the irony of that is that where, where did the church's wealth begin? Giving? They were literally just handed tithing decade after decade after century. That is where their wealth came from, giving.

Spencer Anderson [01:16:39] Right? So we're asked to freely give, but they are not. We're only asked to freely give to the church is what it seems. So in page 56, what might a generous church look like? This is actually, you know, this is a. It isn't an easy issue for the church to address at this point.

Spencer Anderson [01:17:01] The widows might has a few ideas here, but because church investments are growing so fast, it might be growing faster than the church's ability to give away a meaningful portion of it in humanitarian aid. In other words, the interest is growing faster than they can give it away. And so to give billions in direct aid, the church would have to set up a separate global organization with secular governance in order to operate this whole Thing, it's a whole separate infrastructure that would, that would compete with the size of the church itself in order to do this.

Spencer Anderson [01:17:37] But like, like Rebecca said, a potential benefit of at least trying and committing to a goal like this is the altruistic bandwagon effect. You're going to have people that want to join in. People are going to want to be part of the church when they are giving billions and billions a year.

Spencer Anderson [01:17:55] And lots of miracles are possible if the surplus money was deployed in faith instead of being concealed out of fear. I think that that's the, a really key point here, that there it's a faith based exercise. And for the church to not exercise faith and instead act in fear. I think that faithful members should kind of give pause when they see the church hiding this, this money and trying to grow it behind the scenes rather than just having the, having the faith that God will take care of the church if the, if they just act altruistically.

Scenarios for Expanding Charitable Giving

Spencer Anderson [01:18:37] So the next slide is one of the ideas that the, that widows might came up with. They said, you know, well, right now the church is giving, is, has, you know, humanitarian efforts. Basically they rely on 2600 different charity partners and they'll give money to those charity partners or they'll work with those charity partners.

Spencer Anderson [01:18:59] And that can be difficult because you've basically compounded the difficulty of, of, of having to work with additional organizations which can make things even more logistically difficult to give away billions and billions. Elder Bednar said, as an organization, our humanitarian efforts are guided by our commitment to live God's second great commandment, to love our neighbors. We partner with global and other faith based organizations as they work within, within an established set of humanitarian principles.

Spencer Anderson [01:19:28] And the Widow's Might team's idea is that wards and members could be utilized to, to deploy some of these resources in order to expand on charitable giving. So for example, 1.1 billion in aid could be given a year if the church just gave each ward $3,500 a month for community charity donations and support.

Spencer Anderson [01:19:52] So imagine each ward getting $3,500 each month to help with community efforts and service. That's how much money they could easily. And this is only 1.1 billion a year. But you imagine the kind of good that could be done if you simply empowered the members so that they had the resources available to do a lot of good.

Spencer Anderson [01:20:18] So anyway, these are the last few slides where you know, we're kind of talking about like what could the church look like if it were to ramp up its, its giving To a more material level. Does anybody. I don't know if anybody has any comments. I feel like I'm talking too much.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:20:31] You're doing great. I just had one comment that we know that the church said that they have this fund once it was had the whistle blown on it, that it even existed in the EP account that they have this huge fund with massive amounts of money. And the. I think it was Roger Clark who had characterized it as a rainy day fund. And unfortunately that characterization occurred right before the pandemic. And people are wondering, well, if this isn't a rainy day, what is?

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:20:57] But then I started thinking when they say this is a rainy day fund, it's a rainy day for whom? And I think that ultimately, to the degree that they're actually being honest about saying this is a rainy day fund, I don't think they're talking about the members of the church. I don't think they're talking about people who are not members of the church. I think they're talking about the church as an institution and this rainy day fund is there in case the church as an institution needs help.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:21:28] Which actually would characterize those two big disbursements that we know about that have gone out of the. The Ensign Peak fund, which were to help church institution, businesses, the mall, and beneficial life when they were in trouble.

Spencer Anderson [01:21:46] Yeah.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:21:48] What?

Spencer Anderson [01:21:49] Yeah, you just keep breaking me down, man. I'm trying to be more positive. But

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:21:56] had you ever thought of that? What do they mean a rainy day for whom? Because I hadn't thought of it until just now when you were talking.

Spencer Anderson [01:22:05] I think you make a great argument that it probably is referring to the church as the rainy day fund. You know, they're referring to what happens if tithing dries up. Just really interesting because you can't, you know, one way to make sure that tithing doesn't dry up is to not do these things right. So you're kind of self fulfilling the. You're creating the rainy day. In some ways.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:22:29] You almost said a self fulfilling prophecy.

Spencer Anderson [01:22:31] Yeah.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:22:32] Well, at least this would be one prophecy that is fulfilled.

John Dehlin [01:22:36] If I'm trying to understand the mindset of the brethren, I'm thinking back to the time when the church was in debt and they asked members to step up in their tithing. Was that Lorenzo Snow? And it helped get the church out of debt. My guess is kind of these, you know, greatest generation, almost World War II mentality. It's just sort of like let's get a lot of money in the bank so that if we ever Fall on financial hard times, owe a lot of money, get upside down financially. We've got the reserves to bail out the corporation. I'm guessing that's how they're thinking, which at some point makes sense.

Spencer Anderson [01:23:15] Yeah, but John, so from a faithful perspective, doesn't God have the imagination capabilities to use this money in some really amazing way? Like, I understand that the church leaders are 90 something years old, but from a faithful perspective, I would be really disturbed by this idea that like God doesn't want these funds used in any way. He just wants them just sitting there. Because that's the implication, I think.

Radio Free Mormon [01:23:46] Oh, sorry. I was going to say, I think that speaks to what I said before. The trust. I mean, in relatives that I've talked to that are faithful, they just trust. I may not understand it, but I trust that they're doing the right thing. They're communicating with God. They are doing what God wants them to do. And so I feel like the charitable, charitable giving will only increase with pressure from the outside post Mormon community, world at large, you know, media. I don't think there will be any pressure from membership to do anything different because they're very satisfied. And they also, I don't think understand the ratio. I think like you said before, it sounds like a lot. They, they just can't quite understand that in comparison to what they could do and do have, it's a drop in the bucket. So I think it's just, they're comfortable and they trust.

Spencer Anderson [01:24:34] Yeah, but, but honestly. Okay, that's fine. I'm deviating away from, I'm inserting my own personal opinions here. But doesn't it sort of betray this whole thing is man made when the widow's mic team can come up with a better idea for how to use the funds than God?

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:24:57] Yeah. And then the church adopts your idea, the Withers Fund idea of doubling and then doubling again. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:25:04] I mean, my guess, Spencer, is that they need the members to feel like they're really working hand in hand with God and Jesus with direct intervention and real faith. But they know once they ascend to those top leaders, to those top positions of leadership, that they're kind of on their own and that if God works through them, it's in, it's in a very less direct, less tangible way. And so I don't think they're thinking God's going to step in and save them if they're in trouble. I think they're thinking if we don't help ourselves, we probably can't rely on any divine intervention. But they can't.

John Dehlin [01:25:43] They're not going to tell us that. But I think they realize when they get there that revelation and inspiration means a lot. Something very different as they're fulfilling their jobs than what they want us to think. Kind of like the, the, the wizard of Oz behind the curtain. You know what I'm saying?

Spencer Anderson [01:26:02] Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, yeah. The only other thing I'd add to this, to this, these set of slides is that I do see a lot of people that say that the church could solve world hunger. And that's not true. So I do want to kind of correct that misinformation. The church does not have the funds to solve world hunger, but it certainly has the funds to put a real big dent into it. So I'm even seeing it in some of the chat comments here. So I just wanted to kind of clarify, but yeah.

John Dehlin [01:26:35] All right. Should we go to the next slide?

Accounting Concerns in LDS Charities Reporting

Spencer Anderson [01:26:37] Okay. Yeah. So this is kind of the fun part for me. Everybody else's eyes can just glaze over now, but like we get to talk a little bit about the accounting part of the accounting issues of these reports.

Spencer Anderson [01:26:48] And here's a list, like here's an, here's an infographic of all of the metrics, not all of them, but some of the key metrics that can be found in some of the annual reports. And you can see that they're just very sporadic in terms of whether they're consistently given or not. And so the widow's might team had to parse through all of this and try. And this is what I said, this is what I meant when I said that. This is like Sudoku.

Spencer Anderson [01:27:11] They had to kind of like put all of the pieces together in terms of what was given in order to estimate what, what the church should have reported. And this is, this is bad accounting. You should have relevant metrics that, that mean something and you should be consistently giving them so that they can be compared with over time.

Spencer Anderson [01:27:34] On the next slide. There's a major concern that, you know, that you have church welfare resources that are being used for inflating the amount of work that is done in LDS charities. So for example, metrics were indicating that the rising share of church welfare resources. So this is sort of like, you know, Bishop Storehouse resources, Food was going to external partners enabling claims of greater humanitarian generosity. And LDS Charities Australia, which I'm sure we'll talk about a lot more in later, spiked in 2021 after four years of flat pass through activity. And so what you see Is you see this, like this additional amount that's being provided from church welfare resources that is then being claimed to be humanitarian resources.

Spencer Anderson [01:28:30] And more than half of the food produced on church welfare farms is now actually being donated to external charity partners. So these church welfare farms that are supposed to be for internal giving are now being used for external giving.

Spencer Anderson [01:28:44] They aren't classified as such, but the widows might kind of found this out. And then in addition, members in need are now being encouraged to seek aid from government and community before requesting the church help. So it seems as though the church is sort of outsourcing the direct giving portion of, of its, of, of its efforts and rather having people go elsewhere.

Spencer Anderson [01:29:09] And a lot of this just is not showing up in the annual reports that are provided. And so this is a, this is an interesting slide. On the next one, you can see kind of some more additional accounting issues.

Spencer Anderson [01:29:23] Because the Church is providing unclear metrics, it can be very misleading, which we talked about before. But, but when you're talking about charitable giving, if you only share system wide your program impacts, you're not going to see exactly what the smaller portion of the church's impact was when they're working with other charity partners. So for example, If I donate $10 to the American Red Cross, it's possible to talk about that donation in two ways.

Spencer Anderson [01:29:51] An honest and clear impact statement by me would be, I donated $10 to the Red Cross. My donation fed one displaced person for three days. But I could also say it in a very misleading way. I could say my donation of $10. I wouldn't say $10, but I'd say my donation helped feed 19,700 people and I participated in assisting 4,300 refugees.

Spencer Anderson [01:30:17] And this was extremely frustrating for the Widow's mite team to find several instances of exactly this type of language in the, in their charitable reports, in their charity reports. And so in the next few pages, we'll show you some examples of what the Church did in this, in these instances.

Spencer Anderson [01:30:37] So in the next one, for example, under refugee report, it says in 2020, LDS Charities provided funds to 23 agencies to benefit 1,813,072 refugees, internally displaced people and host community members in 39 countries. That was in the 2020 LDS Charities annual report, but it cost 15,000 to settle a refugee. And if LDS Charities was actually doing all of this work, that would only have amounted to $25 to $30 per person. So the numbers are not adding up there. If they're only giving $25 to $30 a person. Why are they claiming that they're giving 15,000 per person? And so it seems as though their impact is being exaggerated by anywhere between 550 times to up to 5,000 times what they're actually doing in these types of statements.

Spencer Anderson [01:31:34] The next one is another good examples under immunizations in the 2020 LDS Charities report, it says in 2020, LDS Charities helped 7,188,356 people in eight countries with vaccinations for diseases such as diphtheria, influenza, MNT, polio, measles, malaria, rubella, and more.

Spencer Anderson [01:31:58] It costs $14 to fully vaccinate a child in sub Saharan Africa. And Most of the 7 to 15 LDS charities annual vaccination projects are volunteer awareness programs, not actual vaccination programs. So that means that the impact claim appears exaggerated to be exaggerated by anywhere between 13 to 40 times what they were actually providing. And so you can see how, like with this kind of language, if you're a member, you might have seen members say that the church is one of the most charitable organizations in the world.

Spencer Anderson [01:32:31] It's because of this type of language that likely that believing members think that, right, this is, this is by design, that they're, that they're misled to believe that the church is doing much more than it's doing.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:32:46] Yeah. And Spencer, with that example that you give and the one before this, it just strikes me that it's obvious what they're hiding, which is the actual amount. But when it comes to everything else other than the amount of money that they're providing, they've got all the details. They've got the number of people who are being helped. They've got the number of partners who are being associated with. They have all these different things that they're being inoculated for. So they've got all these details just right around this glaring hole where they're not telling you the actual amount of money.

Spencer Anderson [01:33:20] Yeah. And thankfully we've got like a good team of analysts that are kind of can circle around that hole pretty well. But yeah, I agree with you. Like, it's, it's very interesting. It's very telling what they don't say in this instance.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:33:32] Yeah. And it's almost like they're trying to hide what they're not saying by saying so much about everything else.

Spencer Anderson [01:33:37] Yeah, that's a good point. So on page 63, under volunteer hours in 2016, Dallin H. Oaks, speaking at Oxford, claimed church volunteers donated 25 million hours of labor to humanitarian and welfare causes in the prior year in 2015. But if you look in the 2021 annual report, the church only claimed 6.8 million hours of service through all of its church welfare and humanitarian efforts.

Spencer Anderson [01:34:04] So those don't reconcile. Unless you had suddenly church welfare volunteer hours go down by 73% in the last six years. Or it was an error. It was likely more likely an error or a lie by Dallin H. Oaks in 2016 to claim that there was there were 25 million hours of labor given. So you have these conflicting metrics without any accountability.

Spencer Anderson [01:34:32] In addition, where it talks about people helped in 2011, it claimed in the tare sheet that it offered over 2 million people were helped in 2013. Just two years later, it claimed that there were over 10.5 million people helped in its annual report.

Spencer Anderson [01:34:49] How Was there a 425% increase in people helped when there was only a 9% increase in projects and there were fewer countries served in that year? And a 50% decline in people impacted by their clean water projects in 2013 versus 2020, 2011 and now after that. So now in 2013, it seems that people caught on or something because now the annual reports only claim that millions of people are helped.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:35:16] It's like McDonald's back when I was a kid. They actually had the number of people served and then after a while when they stopped counting it, it would always increase. Every week they'd change the number. Then it went just to millions and millions served.

Spencer Anderson [01:35:29] Yes.

Radio Free Mormon [01:35:30] Yes.

Spencer Anderson [01:35:30] That's a great example. Yeah. Although I don't think it's. It might not be as through it's with McDonald's. It's because they don't. It's because they've counted so far that it's hard to keep up with the church. It's more. It seems as though it's more about not wanting to just tell. Is that true?

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:35:52] Oh, absolutely. I think that we can tell from the church and when they do their little documentaries that they play between sessions of conference, that if there's anything good in the world that the church does, they're going to be broadcasting that loud and clear. They don't do anything hidden. They want everybody to know all the good works they do. And it looks like they're willing to inflate those numbers in order to make it look like they're doing a lot more than they really are.

Spencer Anderson [01:36:20] Yeah, well, this was the last. These were the last slides for the, the summary of humanitarian efforts. I think we were going to dip into next into their sustainability efforts. I don't Know if there were other comments before we do that or before we jump into the environmental focus,

Radio Free Mormon [01:36:43] I wanted to know, do they count temple work, temple attendance as service? Please tell me. No, no, I don't think service hours. Okay.

Spencer Anderson [01:36:53] I don't think they do and I

Radio Free Mormon [01:36:54] don't think that would be the end.

Spencer Anderson [01:36:56] Yeah, I don't think that they count.

Radio Free Mormon [01:36:58] So.

Spencer Anderson [01:36:58] And to be clear, they don't count as far as we can tell. Proselyting hours of proselyting missionaries. It's just the service hours of those proselyting missionaries that they count. And yeah, otherwise it is weird because. What's the line though, right? So like, if it's, if it's service to clean the building of the church, why is it not service to be a librarian each week and hand out, you know, hand out the, the books? Why is it not service to fill up the font in the, in the baptism and for a baptism? Why is it not service to sing in the church choir? It's just, it's very squishy when you start to kind of use these weird metrics of service that have no clear dollar impact. So I, theoretically it could be thought of as service, but it doesn't seem like they count it. Are there other things here before we jump into sustainability?

Church Sustainability and Environmental Claims

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:37:59] Not for me.

Spencer Anderson [01:38:00] Okay, so this is a real hot topic right now, and it seems like the church is jumping on the bandwagon here because in the latest Caring report, it included a new section called Environmental Stewardship. And I think that, you know, this is in part maybe the response to, you know, heightened awareness about environmental issues local to the church, such as the Great Salt Lake and air quality and things like that. And this new section portrays that there is this, that the church is this organization that is deeply engaged in sustainability.

Spencer Anderson [01:38:33] It wants to reduce carbon emissions, it wants to conserve water, it wants to cut landfill waste. And it even has this quote that says members of the church believe that caring for the earth is closely tied to caring for those in need. And so the issue with that is that there is no data to back that claim up by the church. And so this is a really.

Spencer Anderson [01:38:59] If the church wants to make a huge effort in this area, in the environmental area, it's going to have to do a lot more to catch up with what a lot of for profit organizations are doing right now in the ESG space. Esg referring to environmental, social and governance issues and their reporting of those of those efforts. So if we go to the next page, if this is, this is at its core a new accounting issue. That exists in the world because at its core, sustainability reporting is a science based measurement issue. And with accounting, what we're talking about is, we're talking about measurement. How do we measure whether a company got a profit?

Spencer Anderson [01:39:43] How do we measure whether the company, the church's. How do we measure whether the church is giving or not giving? Things like that. And so sustainability reporting is the same type of thing. And it can be very difficult to measure some of these metrics. It has to be very scientific.

Spencer Anderson [01:39:59] And so while efforts to counsel and counsel to care for the earth are praiseworthy, like if these, even though it's great that the church is stating these things, the reporting for these has to be clear, accountable and transparent. And because, and this happens with a lot of for profit corporations, you get a type of, you get what's called greenwashing, if an organization proclaims to have these sustainability efforts but fails to measure and disclose these specific environmental impact metrics, goals and actions that refer back to their claims. And so an example of greenwashing would be if a church, let's say like a hotel, says, well, maybe this isn't the best example.

Spencer Anderson [01:40:44] But a lot of times these sustainability efforts can be not so much out of a real effort to try and help the environment, but actually because they just want to look good. So an example of that would be a hotel wants to save on its expenses and so it decides to wash its towels less frequently. And then it posts a sign in the bathroom that says, we are so committed to the environment that we're only going to wash your towels once every three days. And so what they're doing is they're window dressing their expenses. What they're really doing is they're cutting their costs. But they've done it in such a way where the marketing is seen as a very positive environmental impact.

Spencer Anderson [01:41:24] Sometimes you can have both going on at the same time. But a lot of times what you'll see with companies is they really, really want to emphasize that impact in misleading ways in their sustainability reporting. And the church seems to be leaning towards that direction. And so we would, I think, you know, I would promote the church towards, if they're really serious about this, then they've got to get in line with what everybody else is doing. There are standard setters that are involved with this. There are best practices, especially in companies in Europe, in terms of what to do in terms of how to report this type of thing.

Spencer Anderson [01:42:01] So if you go to the next slide, some of the advice that the widows mite gives, which I think is great. This is kind of an example of what was given in their sustainability reporting versus what should be given. If it was, if they were serious about this, if they are serious about this, what they need to provide is baselines for comparison. And they have to measure some sort of long term commitment or goal for what they want to accomplish. And so an example of water consumption that they provided, they said 38 million gallon reduction in yearly water consumption since 2018 at church headquarters.

Spencer Anderson [01:42:42] And so first of all, we have no idea what that 38 million gallon reduction even means because what was the consumption before? Was it 2 billion gallons? Why? You know, so what we need some sort of baseline to kind of understand, like what was the percentage reduction in yearly water consumption in church headquarters in order to really gauge what the impact was when it comes to global, what's the global water consumption per year at church headquarters, at chapels, at temples, at byu, at the missionary training centers?

Spencer Anderson [01:43:20] And then what is the goal going forward for how much you want to conserve in water going forward? Is there a goal to, to xeriscape your lawns or that are currently watered pretty well for chapels in, in a lot of areas? Is there? You know, so the, because this metric doesn't give any additional data, what I see is, I, I don't know if I'm right about this, but church headquarters, that's right around, I don't remember when, but when did they start the construction of Temple Square? Does anybody know the time period in which it got started?

Radio Free Mormon [01:44:03] I think it was three or four years ago, but I know they've extended it recently. They've said, oh no, this is now a little out in the future. And I predict they're going to continue to extend it.

Spencer Anderson [01:44:13] Yeah. So if this, if this metric that's given, which is a reduction in water consumption in church headquarters during a period in which, during a time window in which they stopped a lot of their production, the fountain's not running anymore in front of the temple. A lot of the jobs have been outsourced. Then what exactly have you done? Right? So like is this number going to go right back up? And if you're transparent about your, about your sustainability efforts, we should be able to see that in 2025, 2026, when they revamp up the, their all of their operations at church headquarters.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:44:52] My Google search, excuse me, My Google search shows that the reconstruction started at the beginning of 2020.

Spencer Anderson [01:45:00] Okay. So it's right in the middle of that window. So that would, that could explain a lot of the reduction between 2018 and 2022 of water consumption. And, and so, you know, my skeptic brain tells me, like, if you need to provide, you need to provide some nuance around these numbers if you want me to be able to believe that they are real efforts at reducing water consumption.

Spencer Anderson [01:45:26] Another one, it says five, they said in their sustainability report, 500 plus meeting houses currently with solar initiatives worldwide. First of all, I have no idea what a solar initiative is. What does that even mean? We don't know what the benchmark is. What are the meeting houses that are worldwide? 500 chapels is only 3% of all of the chapels worldwide.

Spencer Anderson [01:45:48] What is the total church energy consumption per year? What are the scope 1, 2 and 3 carbon emissions per year? For those of you who aren't aware what carbon emissions are, scope one and two are sort of your direct carbon emissions.

Spencer Anderson [01:46:03] So for example, your carbon emissions from like your vehicle that you own would be a scope 1 carbon emission. Scope 3 carbon emissions would be very difficult, are very difficult to measure and I would expect a lot of measurement error around that. But scope three carbon emissions would be something like what is the environmental impact of the sacrament cups once they have already left our hands and are disposed of by other companies.

Spencer Anderson [01:46:34] So it's sort of like downstream and upstream carbon emission effects because I exist as an entity. So those are type, those are the types of things that companies are having to provide. Now is scope one, two and three carbon emissions. And the church isn't, is, is years and years behind what it should be providing if it wants to be serious about this.

Radio Free Mormon [01:46:57] I have an interesting story about carbon emissions if you have one. Second, first of all, I will say in my area, I live in the heart of the heart of Utah county and I do see xeriscapes going in buildings. I do, you know, see some, but it's sort of hit and miss. So the church building that I attended and the wards around me, we could all walk to it was right in our neighborhood up the street there's another church building and neighborhoods, the wards walk to that. So they realign things, I think to do with priesthood presence. And now we switch buildings. So everyone in my neighborhood drives. We can no longer walk to the other building. Everyone in that neighborhood drives to the church in our building. So Sunday is simply full of cars going back and forth and no one's able to walk anymore. It's just hit and miss, like I said.

Spencer Anderson [01:47:44] That's a great example, Rebecca, of a scope to carbon emission. Yeah. So like the churches causing carbon emissions indirectly because of that, it's awesome. Yeah, Great. Great example. And they could. And honestly, it goes both ways, right? So by them building temples that are more accessible, your scope to carbon emissions should go down. And that's fine. Like, that should be reported, right? People don't have to drive as far to go to the nearest temple. Okay. That should be reported.

Spencer Anderson [01:48:13] Also, the carbon emissions for creating the temple should be reported. And these are the types of things that, like, engineers and scientists are being hired to do for companies in order to help with their sustainability reporting. And the church has the funds to do it. So it's just about whether they're serious about it.

Spencer Anderson [01:48:32] Another thing that they should provide is a goal, right? What is their goal for solar? And a big one that I think would be interesting is we can see now with Enzyme Peaks 13F filings, what companies they invest in. If they're really serious about sustainability efforts, are they going to avoid stocks that have poor sustainability scores? That would be really interesting to me to see if they decide to kind of avoid some of these companies that have really low scores in terms of their environmental impact on the world.

Spencer Anderson [01:49:03] So that's it for this slide. I think it's an interesting world that we're looking at. And obviously the church is kind of trying to jump on what I think a lot of people care about right now. Here's a. Here's a couple more. I'll go more quickly through these. But they said in their report, 73 million tons of recycled goods processed by Deseret Industries in 2022. First of all, it was not 73 million tons. It was 73 million pounds. And I think it was just a typo.

Spencer Anderson [01:49:34] And the widows might kind of figure that out. But why did the weight of the donated goods sent to be the recycle rise so much? So in 2021, it went from 58 million, and then in 2022, that's 73 million. So if you're. You know what the. What the church should be providing is is give us an example of why this would be going up so much. It might not be a good thing that more is going into recycling processing rather than being reused, which is what a lot of the products for di are aiming to do.

Spencer Anderson [01:50:07] And then for. In terms of, like, how do you know that they actually got processed, that these were recycled goods that actually did get recycled? Can you verify that they were recycled? Another example is church. They stated that church facilities recycled over 4,000 tons of paper, metal, cardboard, and plastic.

Spencer Anderson [01:50:28] What happened in previous years? How does this compare to the weight they sent to the landfill. What is the goal for the weight in future years that they would want to recycle? So you can see that, like, there's just a lot missing. I applaud their initial effort, but, like, I'm hoping that in 2023 that it is about 100 times better than this, because this is. This would not.

Spencer Anderson [01:50:53] This would not go over well. If it was a company where. Where, you know, I was. If you cared about the environment and you were trying to decide whether the. The company was serious about environmental giving, this would not cut it at all.

Spencer Anderson [01:51:08] So in the next slide, the widows might provide some. Some. Just some general recommendations. So first of all, it mentions that in the UK the church was required to provide and measure some of these data. And so that's a great thing. It's great that these regulations exist to kind of help give us a flavor of what the church could do. Obviously, they can do it, but it would be nice if they clearly stated what their values are, measured them. Well, that's an accounting issue. And then reported them and then set goals and set a plan for how they would achieve those goals. And for anybody who's been a missionary, the church knows how to do this.

Spencer Anderson [01:51:47] Right. They have already delineated the difference between goals and plans, and they could do weekly planning sessions and all of that. And so they just need to relay this information to the members and to the general populace. So that's it for environmental focus. I don't know if any. I thought that this was a fascinating area that's kind of in its early stages. It's.

Spencer Anderson [01:52:11] This is the first time the church has kind of really made a big effort at reporting anything on this. So if anybody. I don't know if any of you had any comments on it,

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:52:22] none here. Except for. I could see them using this term recycled in a broad sense to encompass not only those things that go through the recycling process, as we would normally think about it, but also the goods coming into DI that are recycled and going to the store and then being bought or perhaps donated to other members of the church.

Spencer Anderson [01:52:44] Yeah, you're right. Again, you're always right. Rfm.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:52:50] You're too kind.

Radio Free Mormon [01:52:51] I always think about fonts, right. Being in the heart of the heart of Utah county, and any given Sunday when it's baptism day, I think I tried to do the calculation how much water is in each of those fonts in each of those buildings, times hundreds. I don't know if anyone's ever thought about that.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:53:08] I don't know. But I expect the water usage went down dramatically at the beginning of 2020 when nobody was going to church or to the temples or probably to the church office building.

Radio Free Mormon [01:53:19] Yeah, we might have to return to sprinkling, I don't know, maybe.

Spencer Anderson [01:53:23] Or to the fonts, hopefully. Well, maybe not as many returning to the fonts either.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:53:30] So that's how they're saving water. They're not baptizing people anymore.

Radio Free Mormon [01:53:36] That's the only reason.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:53:39] Yeah.

Spencer Anderson [01:53:40] Okay. So just as a, at this point, we just have a summary for all of the humanitarian efforts and then we're going to dip in some, into some tax issues, which I know people really care about. In summary, you know, I think that there are some good things and some things that really need to be improved on that we can kind of get out of this. These humanitarian, this whole humanitarian arena. The first one that I think is really important to highlight in terms of how effective the church's efforts are is the church really does a good job at mobilizing members generosity and service.

Overall Assessment of Church Humanitarian Efforts

Spencer Anderson [01:54:14] Around 1.02 billion and millions of service hours offered in humanitarian aid. So they've, they've done a really good job. And you know, people talk about this, about how the church kind of gets all of its members to come together whenever there's a natural disaster and things like that.

Spencer Anderson [01:54:34] Another positive 100% of donations that are designated for humanitarian aid and fast offerings are passed on to provide assistance. That doesn't include, you know, if the church provides. If the church signs a check for 15 million to the Red Cross, some of that 15 million might go to the Red Cross's administration. But at the very least, 100% of your donation goes. None of that goes to the church's administrative costs. So the church goes ahead and uses, I believe, tithing to pay for the administrative costs of these humanitarian efforts, which I think is a very strong positive as well. If you're ever looking to, you know, what, what should I, what should I donate to?

Spencer Anderson [01:55:15] What kind of charity should I donate to? One of the first things you'll look at is what is their percentage of giving. If I donate a dollar, how much of it is it going to the managers versus how much is how much of it is going to an actual cause?

Spencer Anderson [01:55:28] I think that their focus on high leverage, you know, altruistic, sorry, what's the, what's the word for it? Effective altruism is for specific problems is really great. So they've highlighted some of the top things that, that need to be worked on in, in the world. This, in 2022 and beyond. And then they also have found some really good, high quality global charity partners to leverage their infrastructure that they already have to leverage. The fact that they already have boots on the ground in those areas of the world. And so, you know, partnering with people like the Red Cross and the World Food Program and unicef, those are all really good, positive things that the church does.

Spencer Anderson [01:56:15] What could they do better? Well, their financial reporting is very incomplete and very inconsistent and very incomparable and very unclear and very un and very difficult to understand and unverifiable. It's just really poor accounting. And so they could do a much better job of that. Their annual reports don't disaggregate financial data for welfare programs and their faith blind humanitarian aid. And I think that they should definitely distinguish between those two.

Spencer Anderson [01:56:46] And then their accelerated humanitarian giving can be difficult to sustain in its current trajectory. Like doubling year over year could be a very difficult thing to do. And so what they could do, and this is what the widows might recommend, is to use local wards as a way to pass through a lot of the giving that's done. And I think that that brings its own set of issues, its own set of difficulties. Because, well, you know, if, if you have $3,500 a month going, for example, going to wards in Utah, suddenly you're going to, I, I would imagine that you're going to see a lot of nonprofits suddenly pop up and a lot of bishops helping the nonprofits of the people in the ward.

Spencer Anderson [01:57:34] And maybe salaries are a little high for those nonprofits. And so you can kind of see how maybe that would become a problem if there wasn't a lot of governance and controls around a system like that. But in the end, it could really vamp up a lot of the giving that's been, that, that's done. And then lastly, what could be done better? They've already given this commitment to sustainability, but they're reporting on that Sustainability commitment is vague. It lacks any baseline impact data. It offers no targets, it offers no methods to get to those targets. And so they need to provide some sort of environmental impact report.

Spencer Anderson [01:58:10] Otherwise what they're saying is just going to fall on deaf ears by anybody that is not just the most faithful member out there. It's, it's, it would be pretty obvious that it's just greenwashing at that point. So that's it for humanitarian efforts. I don't know if we want to jump into the tax issues now.

Church Charity Structures in Australia and Canada

John Dehlin [01:58:30] Okay.

Radio Free Mormon [01:58:31] It's what we've been waiting for, I bet. Yeah.

Spencer Anderson [01:58:37] There have been A lot of questions, recent questions on moving money around for tax purposes that the church has been doing. The first one is in Canada. The Mormon Church in Canada moved 1 billion out of the country tax free.

Spencer Anderson [01:58:50] And it's legal. This was all money that was going, funneling from Canada into byu. And then there was an investigation in Australia accusing the church of a multinational tax rort. And so first, let's kind of talk a little bit about Australia. I think this is the more serious one for sure.

Spencer Anderson [01:59:10] In the next slide, we talk a little bit to kind of get set the stage for it. In 2000, I think in the early 2010s, Australia changed its tax law so that if you donated to a religion, it wasn't necessarily going to become tax deductible anymore for you. So you couldn't just write it off on your taxes if you donated to a religion like you can in the United States.

Spencer Anderson [01:59:35] Instead, that religion has to register and prove that it's a charity. And it has to go through a lot of hoops to show that it's actually engaging in some sort of charity work. And part of this is because Australia is a very secular country. Simon Southerton. And first of all, special thanks to Aaron Black and Simon Southerton. They're both informed Australians who helped me verify some of the widow might, the widow mite's team's work on this. So a lot of this I was trying to kind of verify on the back end and they helped me on this end. So Simon Southerton was one of the whistleblowers.

Spencer Anderson [02:00:13] He was one of the ones that kind of complained as well as Aaron. She also sent some complaints to the Australian tax authorities on this issue. So in 2010, 2012, somewhere around there, Australia changed this tax law because I think it was this very secular country was very tired of the populace donating to organizations that were tax exempt and then pastors taking that money and then just enriching themselves or not using it to help the community around them. And so now religions in Australia, they have to show that they're doing some good with their money, with the donations that are given. And so because tithing paid by church into churches is not tax deductible, the church sends most of its worldwide cash donations to LDS Charities through an Australian entity called LDS Charities Australia.

Spencer Anderson [02:01:07] And these charitable donations are then mixed with tithing from Australian members. And it makes the process makes Australian tithing looks like look like it's a small part of a global humanitarian charity effort. Later, the LDS charity funds are dispersed to humanitarian partners and then they take those funds that were tithing and they're paid by, or, sorry, the church expenses that are in Australia are paid by another entity.

Spencer Anderson [02:01:35] And so by mixing Australian tithing with these LDS charity donations that come from other areas of the world, it allows members to, in Australia to claim a tax deduction on tithing. Let me kind of put this another way. Maybe I'll try and kind of explain it because I, it can be a little bit difficult to understand. So let's just say that Australia brings in 40 million in tithing in a year and it needs that 40 million to operate its temples and to operate its church buildings and things like that.

Spencer Anderson [02:02:06] Well, it can't take that 40 million and use it towards the temples and the church buildings because that's not tax deductible. And so what it will do is it has to take that 40 million in tithing, put it into a charitable organization which is called, let's see, it's not LDS Charities Australia, it's some sort of umbrella fund, but anyway, the latter day state charity trust or something like that and it goes into that trust fund and then 40 million will come from global sources as well and it'll mix up all of that money. And so all of that money that came from other sources can then be used towards humanitarian efforts.

Spencer Anderson [02:02:59] And then any excess money kind of gets trickled out and goes into, and gets into the, any, any additional money from other global sources comes in and ends up being used to like actually pay for the building costs and things like that. And so what the church is doing on a global level is they're double dipping on their tax exempt donations. They take a tax deduction on US tithes and then they take them into Australia to then allow Australian members with the same money from the US tithes to then take a deduction and then that money then gets used for humanitarian purposes.

Spencer Anderson [02:03:39] So there's a lot going on with this, but it very clearly is an issue. There's an ongoing tax investigation I think about the way that they operate. We could go to the next slide if you want to, to qualify as a charity. There are certain things that the church has to do in this area. One of them is that the key management decisions that LDS Charities Australia makes have to be made in Australia. But LDS Charities Australia has no full time employees and it lists only four part time volunteers.

Spencer Anderson [02:04:11] In addition, those key decisions that are made in public appearances and press releases, Church humanitarian giving is always given by church area authorities. Church Presiding Bishoprics Utah based Director of LDS Charities but never by these four volunteers at LDS Charities Australia.

Spencer Anderson [02:04:31] And so clearly they're, they're not following the, at least the very, the spirit of the law in this sense, where they're supposed to have basically a local base where the decisions are centralized within Australia. Instead, it seems as though LDS Charities Australia just is acting as a pass through entity and a shell company of sorts.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [02:04:51] Of

Spencer Anderson [02:04:53] something that Simon brought up to me as well was that one of the things that's required is that you have to be publicly visible as a charity as well. So the public has to know, like here are the efforts that we're making towards charitable efforts with LDS Charities Australia. And it's really interesting because he said that until the First Presidency mentioned it in a letter about a year ago, members had no idea that LDS Charities Australia even existed. And that's against Australia tax law. You're supposed to be a publicly visible entity in order to be, in order to be tax deductible.

Radio Free Mormon [02:05:34] And this is really question about that. Spencer, really quickly. So it sounds to me like the Australian members are not paying tithing, they're donating to a charity. How were they not aware? I would assume they would have to. Something's different on their tithing slip. How did they not know?

Spencer Anderson [02:05:49] I think that it was still designated as tithing. And then that tithing then just gets puts. So everybody in Australia thinks that they're just operating as normal as any member would operate. But then what the church is doing behind the scenes is they're taking that tithing, sticking it into this LDS Charities trust and then mixing it with the other money, sending it off. And then some other money is coming in from elsewhere to then pay for what the tithing would have normally been paid for.

Radio Free Mormon [02:06:18] So they're still writing out a check to the church and then the church takes it from there. They're not writing out a check to a charity. Okay.

Spencer Anderson [02:06:24] Correct. Yep. They're still writing it to the church. But it's just an interesting dynamic where rfm, you mentioned how like the church will always publicly talk about any of the giving that they're doing. So like, you know, let's say that the church gives 20 million to UNICEF. That's huge news. You're going to see it in. You're going to see it in the, in all of the reports of church news. Right. You're going to see it in Deseret News, you're going to see it in Salt Lake Tribune. The church is going to publicize that to the extent that it can. Look how generous we are. We gave 20 million to UNICEF.

Spencer Anderson [02:07:03] Well, roughly 90 million goes through various entities through LDS Charities Australia. And not a word in local Australia church news gets announced so suddenly when it comes to charitable efforts driven by Australia, suddenly the church is really, really reluctant to, to talk about all of the good that it's doing, even though it's talking about much less good that's being doing on a more global scale. And you would think that if there was nothing nefarious going on, they would say, look how generous our Australian saints are. But nope, nothing. There's no press about it at all.

Spencer Anderson [02:07:42] So this is, I think that it's obvious that the church and you know, in the last year the church has ramped, has kind of gone down in terms of how much it's using this strategy. It recently came out with a statement that basically says we're still going to exist. But I don't, I don't know to what extent that that's actually going to happen.

Spencer Anderson [02:08:03] But it will be interesting to see. You know, if the church loses its tax exempt status in this, in Australia, think of the burden that it places on members. They're already being asked to give 10%, but they're also being asked to tap to.

Spencer Anderson [02:08:17] They're still having to pay taxes on that 10% that they're giving. That would be really tough. I don't know if there's anything else on, on this one or if there are any questions from like the audience. I don't know.

John Dehlin [02:08:31] In.

Spencer Anderson [02:08:32] On the next page. We could go to the next page. There are actually several financial entities that are used for LDS Charities Australia. There are I think five that are operating right now, five charitable organizations. One of them is for buildings, one of them is for fast offerings, things like that. But basically from 2017 to 2021, 80 to 85% of the church's cash humanitarian giving went, went through LDS Charities Australia. So they're using LDS Charities Australia as just some pass through entity here. Less than 0.5% of those funds actually came from Australia and less, less than 2% of the LDs Charities personnel actually live in Australia. And yet 80 to 85% of the humanitarian giving worldwide by the church is passing through this entity. So it's very clear that they're overstating the impact that is being done with Australian saints tithing here. And that's it. That's all I got for Australia. Is there anything else?

Radio Free Mormon [02:09:41] I think if you read the church's statement that they put out about it, it doesn't really say anything. It's just like, yep, we're in Australia. That's all. I mean, I would encourage everybody to read that statement. It's very interesting. They don't really address anything that's going on.

Spencer Anderson [02:09:53] Well, read it if you want to pull your hair out. Because it doesn't talk about. Yeah, like you said, it doesn't say anything about taxes at all.

Radio Free Mormon [02:10:00] Right.

Spencer Anderson [02:10:00] It doesn't talk about tax exemption. It doesn't talk about the issue. It just says that it exists. That's all it says.

Radio Free Mormon [02:10:06] Yep.

Spencer Anderson [02:10:06] And it's really weird. I agree with you. At this point, I think we kind of expect those types of press releases. Just.

Radio Free Mormon [02:10:15] Yep.

Spencer Anderson [02:10:17] Something that's else that's interesting. This kind of gets away from the Australian issue. But on the next page, the church, not only did it combine kind of its reporting of humanitarian giving and the. Sorry, the page before that.

Spencer Anderson [02:10:31] Yeah. Not only does the church, starting in 2021, it started to combine humanitarian giving with its welfare giving, but it also decided to get rid of LDS Charities as an entity. So direct the director of LDS Charity Sharon Eubank suddenly took on the title in Quarter 3 of 2022 of Director of Church Humanitarian Services.

Spencer Anderson [02:10:54] And the LDS Charities website was taken offline in March of 2023. And the widows. My team sort of came up with three possible reasons why they got rid of LDS Charities. I think, I think I'll add one as well. But first of all, centralized identity. So in 2022, the church gave more tithing to charity partners than all member humanitarian donations combined. And so by using tithing, now that they're using tithing, they, it makes sense for them to just centralize it all under the church's umbrella. So a separate brand for LDS Church. LDS Charities doesn't make a lot of sense for external giving if they're going to be using tithing.

Spencer Anderson [02:11:34] The second reason would be because of this Australian tax issue, because this LDS Charities Australia is facing a lot of negative press. The LDS Charities parent organization, I guess you could call it, it might have, you know, some negative connotation associated with it. There might be a stigma around the name itself. And it might also be an indicator that the church anticipates losing a legal challenge by the Australian tax office. And so they're, they're going to, you know, start moving away from this whole scheme and then also for to, to avoid brand damage. Right. So there's like, I like is mentioned here in the third point, like negative press coverage of their, their whole tax avoidance scheme might have damaged the brand.

Spencer Anderson [02:12:25] I think a Fourth reason would be that some if, if you're looking at what the church is doing and it's all under the LDS Charities umbrella, it might seem like it's not the church anymore, that it's like some other organization. And so to the extent that the church can say, look, it's us that's doing it, I think it makes a lot of sense for them to consolidate and just say, this is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints that's giving this money, not LDS Charities, which might not be as recognizable, it might not be as, might not have the brand value. It might not be able to kind of, you might not be able to tie the organization to the efforts that are being made as easily.

Spencer Anderson [02:13:07] And so it's better pr, I think, to have it all being done by the church itself. And then there's one more issue when it comes to taxes on the next slide, and this is the Canadian issue. In 2022, there was a, there was a, an airing, I think, on 60 Minutes. Was it 60 Minutes for the Canadian version of 60 Minutes that talked about the church being accused of abusing its tax laws by sending 100 million roughly a year to BYU. Because in Canada, a charity like the church, it has to devote, it has to show that it's devoting all of its resources to charitable work.

Spencer Anderson [02:13:49] And that means that it has to spend on charitable activities or, or make gifts to a qualified donee. Now, this might ruffle the feathers of quite a few Canadian people out there because they might say, well, you're not helping Canadians by actually donating to the church. So why is that tax exempt? And a qualified donee can. The issue is it could include non Canadian universities if it ordinarily includes students from Canada.

Spencer Anderson [02:14:21] And so BYU is qualified as Canadian as a donee for Canadian tithing. And so if members in Canada want to donate to the church and the church uses those donations to send to byu, those, those are qualified expenses for. Those are tax deductible expenses. And anybody who's donating tithing to the church in Canada will still get a tax deduction.

Spencer Anderson [02:14:51] And so both the widows, my team and myself, we don't see this as an illegal issue. We don't see this as tax fraud. This is a legal scheme that they're doing. This is reasonable for the church to do it. A lot of companies would do something like this.

Spencer Anderson [02:15:10] It's just basically using, taking advantage of the fungibility of cash to reroute tithing funds that are into Canada into byu. And so while it's legal. And while it is reasonable for the church to do this, I can see why Canadian citizens would be extremely frustrated with this setup because BYU might be seen as a bigoted university that doesn't promote or help LGBTQ people.

Spencer Anderson [02:15:41] And so to the extent that Canadian dollars are essentially being subsidized to help these efforts and then getting a tax deduction on the back end of that, I could see why Canadians would be upset by that. I could also see why Canadians would be upset that the charitable efforts by the. This money isn't staying within Canada to actually help people in Canada.

Spencer Anderson [02:16:03] And so it's. It's legal. It's. I can see how people are upset about it, but it's not. The church isn't doing anything wrong here. Does that make sense to everybody? John? Does that make sense?

John Dehlin [02:16:16] Yeah, makes sense for sure.

Spencer Anderson [02:16:19] And I want to clarify, that's not tax fraud, because I've seen posts that say, like, oh, well, the church is committing tax fraud in Australia, just like in the United States, just like in Canada. But there's no evidence of tax fraud in Canada or the United States as of yet. In terms of tax fraud, operational tax fraud, there are some issues with tax reporting in. In the U.S. but.

John Dehlin [02:16:42] Yeah.

Spencer Anderson [02:16:43] So this is it. We've only got two more slides.

John Dehlin [02:16:46] All right, we're almost there.

Spencer Anderson [02:16:48] Sorry if it's. I hope that nobody's falling asleep yet. Man. I just feel like this is like one of the.

John Dehlin [02:16:52] No, I think there's been feedback that maybe we were too heavy on the commentary on previous episodes. So I think we're trying to give you lots of space to get through the material you've got, so it's good.

Key Takeaways from the Widow's Mite Report

Spencer Anderson [02:17:05] All right. Well, so for just in general, I think that the main takeaway of all of the Willow's Might efforts could be summarized in a couple of slides here. One of them is that the church's savings continue to accumulate and accumulate at an exponential rate, basically.

Spencer Anderson [02:17:24] And it continues allocating virtually all of its savings and unused tithing to accumulate more money. Rather than to help the poor and the needy, they've decided to. The value of the widow's mites accumulated into church's investments is. Is. Is exorbitant. It's a huge amount, and. And so little of it is used to help the poor and the needy. In fact, none of it is used to. To help the poor and the needy. Once it gets into Ensign Peak, which was David Nielsen's initial complaint, was that the money goes in and it never comes out, at least for any Charitable purposes.

Spencer Anderson [02:18:04] And so we can go to the next slide, the last slide. And so, you know, the, the whole idea here is like, so what? All of this information that we've covered, so what? What's the big deal? I think that if you're a faithful member, you might be comfortable with how the church handles its finances and, and how it invests a portion of your tithing yesterday, today, and in the future. And if so, if you're comfortable with that, that's okay. I think that there's room for disagreement here.

Spencer Anderson [02:18:33] Tithing's a matter of faith. If you feel like it's not your job to even worry about it, that's fine. But you're now a more informed donor. And so now you, when you make claims about, you know, the church's giving and things like that, you. You're informed about where that donation is going. And maybe, maybe, maybe that will help you feel proud about what you're doing. Maybe, maybe not. That's okay.

Spencer Anderson [02:18:57] You might be upset, I think, with the amount of money saved and earned by the church and believe that these excess funds should bless the poor and the needy today rather than waiting for some obscure rainy day. And if so, that's okay too. I think that that's a perfectly legitimate response because the church is. The church exists and should exist to serve all of God's children. It's wealthy, it can afford to be far more generous, and it could address despair and poverty everywhere. And every day that the church decides not to engage in that effort, there are people that are dying, there are people that are suffering.

Spencer Anderson [02:19:36] And the church has to have on it has to consider and weigh those opportunity costs against this priority to just build its treasure chest. And I think that in the end, widows mites efforts are only there to help people become more informed. The widows might would not exist, the widows might team wouldn't exist if the church just gave the information out. And so I really applaud the widow's mites efforts. I think that it's great. I think that financial transparency is key to building and fostering trust in today's society. And somehow the widow's might is becoming the mediator and all of that for and in behalf of the church.

Spencer Anderson [02:20:20] I think that, you know, I've heard of stories of press, of major press people trying to write journal articles, going to the widow's might to make sure that their, their numbers are accurate. Because the widow's might is, is becoming sort of a big player in this area. So thank you to the widow's night yeah.

John Dehlin [02:20:40] So huge, huge thanks to widow's might and huge thanks to you, Spencer, for your willingness to be kind of a spokesperson, for lack of a better word for them. And so we really appreciate your expertise and your analysis. And RFM had to take off. But Rebecca, Bibliotheca, we always love your contributions as well, so thank you so much.

Radio Free Mormon [02:21:05] Oh, you're so welcome. I'm sorry, I think I have an echo or had an echo, so I apologize for that again. But I'd also like just to say, I'd like to echo your sentiments with Spencer, that kudos to you because I think that your involvement now with widow's mind is, is going to help even more people have access to their information to be able to understand and synthesize their amazing information. So good for you, Spencer.

John Dehlin [02:21:27] Absolutely. All right. Well, Spencer, we hope you won't be a stranger and we hope we can have you back on Mormon stories whenever there's a good story you think we should cover because we, we've helped a lot of people understand, but become aware of the widow's might through these episodes and become more aware, more importantly, of the church's financial position. So we hope that you'll come back anytime you've got something you think is important for our audience to hear.

Spencer Anderson [02:21:58] Sure, I'd be happy to. And just as a closing statement, I guess I think that the true, I think that in 2020, one of the presiding Bishopric members, right when the Ensign Peak stuff came out, he said the true wealth of the church is in its members.

Spencer Anderson [02:22:13] And I think I agree with that statement. And so what's so perplexing and so saddening to me is that the church is losing its true wealth while focusing on the US Dollar. And I hope, I really do hope that, that in the future, you know, as church leadership turns over, that, that an emphasis on, on church membership and on and on doing good and doing what Christ would want to do would take precedence over the US Dollar.

Spencer Anderson [02:22:45] That's what I would love to see. And I, I hope that, you know, I have family members that are still going to the church frequently. And it saddens me to see the, the potential that the church has without seeing it fulfilled.

John Dehlin [02:22:58] Brilliant. Well, the report is, I believe, widowsmightreport.WordPress.com Is that right, Spencer?

Spencer Anderson [02:23:06] Yeah, it's. The widows might report. No. Widowsmightreport.WordPress.com Is that what I said? I think maybe. Okay. All right, you can google it.

John Dehlin [02:23:18] Widowsmightreport.WordPress.com thanks to the team. If people want to give tips to either widows might or you. Is there anything you want to say about how they can do that?

Spencer Anderson [02:23:30] Yeah, just shoot me an email or you can shoot an email to the widowsmightreportmail.com they don't want any secret information that is illegal to share. But you know, for example, like in the humanitarian, the, the annual reports that the church gave out, they couldn't find the 2012 report, for example. So if anybody has that, like if you find anything like that, please share it. And it would be great for them to to build up on their estimates. There have been other, you know, reports that they didn't know existed that they are even just currently wading through. And so as those kind of reports come out and as that data comes comes out, it just makes the estimates that much better and it makes the reports that much better for that we all get to enjoy.

Spencer Anderson [02:24:15] So if you have anything to share, you can either email me, you can look me up on Google, I'm at Indiana University. Or you can email the widowsmightreportmail.com all right.

John Dehlin [02:24:28] Thanks Spencer. Don't be a stranger. Thanks, Rebecca. Please check out Mormonish podcast. Please check out Radio Free Mormon and Mormonism Live podcast. Please subscribe and like us on YouTube. Please like this episode. Please subscribe to it. Please also subscribe to us and check us out on Facebook, on Instagram, on TikTok and you know, wherever you consume social media, that always helps the algorithm. We're really grateful for the people who donated today. Thanks to Colby Reddish who donated. Colby writes. Sorry for the mic issues but just wanted to thank you for this important reporting.

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John Dehlin [02:26:14] You guys, we have a lot of good stuff to come in the weeks, months and years ahead. So please stay tuned, be good to each other, be kind to each other, and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Take care, everybody.

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