re: #130 Anymouse 🌹🏡

Religious organisations are explicitly exempt in the tax code from reporting income and expenditures. They are not really skirting the law when they do not report, because they are not required to (much in the same manner I don’t file income tax forms because I am not required to).

Where it becomes a problem is when they use the explicit exemption in the law to perpetrate fraud (such as Kent Hovind with his multi-million dollar mansion he tried to write off as a parsonage, or Jim Bakker skimming from the PTL Club).

In Germany, the Bishop of Limburg built a 30-million-euro residence out of church funds he had “redirected”, the trick was to keep each individual invoice under 250K, above which they would have been subjected to further scrutiny by the Vatican.