The Mormon Church is involved in a significant alleged tax rort, allowing its adherents to collect hundreds of millions of dollars in tax exemptions not lawfully available to followers of other religions.
Highlights
- LDS Charities Australia has no paid staff, Australian website, expenses or infrastructure to run what purports to be one of the country’s major charities.
- It collects more in individual donations than Oxfam, Beyond Blue or Caritas Australia, the Catholic Church’s international aid charity.
- The church says it spent just $36,000 a year, on average, on charitable donations between 1985 and 2010.
- A tax expert says it is inconceivable that the church was making significant global charitable decisions from Australia.
- The Australian Tax Office made a binding ruling that for an Australian charity to have deductible gift recipient (DGR) status, it must have Australia as “the focal point of the DGR in a legal or organisational sense”