1831–2025

Church Finances, Tithing, and the Transparency Question

From the Kirtland bank to a $100 billion fund, and what the Church will not say

12 people, ordered by how much of this topic turns on them. Each note describes the person's part in this topic, not a biography — the same person carries a different note on another topic.

JJ

Joseph Smith Jr.

1805–1844

Founding prophet

He organized the Kirtland Safety Society in November 1836 and served as its cashier, then its treasurer, resigning in June 1837 as it collapsed. The 8 July 1838 revelation at Far West now canonized as Doctrine and Covenants 119 established tithing as 'one-tenth of all their interest annually,' the standing law the modern Church still cites. He was also the first trustee-in-trust, an office created in 1841 that put the Church's temporal property in one man's hands.

Wikipedia Image: Public domain

BY

Brigham Young

1801–1877

Trustee-in-trust, second president

Young defined tithing as a tenth of everything a convert owned on joining, a tenth again on arrival in Utah, then a tenth of annual income. He told an 1861 congregation that on Church money 'our books are open,' while keeping his private business accounts separate under his own clerks. He told the October 1875 general conference that neither he nor anyone else had ever paid tithing as the revelation actually required. He died a millionaire.

Wikipedia Image: Public domain

LS

Lorenzo Snow

1814–1901

Fifth president; tithing reformer

Snow inherited a Church near bankruptcy in 1898 and made getting it out of debt his first priority. In May 1899, at St. George, he received what he described as a revelation on tithing and spent the rest of his life preaching a tithing reformation across the stakes. He told a Salt Lake audience on 30 May 1899 that the Church had 'no reserve at all.' The tithing discipline he established is the direct ancestor of the modern Church's finances.

Wikipedia Image: Public domain

JS

Joseph F. Smith

1838–1918

Sixth president; first disclosures

Smith announced at April 1907 conference that the Church owed 'not a dollar that it cannot pay at once.' Under pressure from the 1904–07 Senate investigation of Reed Smoot, he acknowledged in 1904 that general authorities were supported from tithing, and in 1915 began the annual disclosure of how tithing was disbursed — describing it as a liberty he took because of the 'false charges' made against him. He also told, repeatedly, the story of his widowed mother insisting on paying tithing in potatoes.

Wikipedia Image: Public domain

JJ

J. Reuben Clark Jr.

1871–1961

Counselor; architect of fiscal restraint

Clark read the annual financial report to general conference for seven consecutive years and made the disclosures of the 1940s the most detailed the Church ever gave — several printed pages, itemized by category. He kept Depression-era spending below a fraction of annual tithing revenue and funneled Church money into low-risk bank accounts rather than speculation. His removal from the reading of the report in April 1952 begins the retreat that ends in 1959.

Wikipedia Image: CC BY 4.0 — Los Angeles Times

DM

David O. McKay

1873–1970

Ninth president

McKay presided over the last detailed public financial report, given at April 1959 conference for the year 1958. He allowed the deficit spending that followed, and — according to Quinn — was persuaded by his counselor Henry D. Moyle not to publish even an abbreviated accounting afterward. The Church has never resumed itemized public disclosure of expenditures since.

Wikipedia Image: Public domain

HM

Henry D. Moyle

1889–1963

Counselor; deficit spender

Appointed second counselor in June 1959, two months after the last published expenditure report, Moyle took direction of Church finances and launched a large increase in spending, especially on buildings. Quinn writes that the Church spent $8 million more than it received in 1959, against a $7 million surplus the year before. Moyle is the figure most directly linked in the historical literature to the end of published accounts.

Wikipedia Image: Public domain

GH

Gordon B. Hinckley

1910–2008

Fifteenth president

Hinckley gave the two statements that anchor every later argument. In April 1991 he set out the 'two basic and fixed principles' of Church finance — live within its means, and set aside a fixed percentage against a possible 'rainy day.' In April 2003 he told conference that 'tithing funds have not and will not be used' to acquire or develop the City Creek property, which would come instead from commercial entities and 'the earnings of invested reserve funds.' Those words became the central exhibit in the Huntsman litigation.

Wikipedia Image: Public domain

DN

David A. Nielsen

b. 1978

Ensign Peak whistleblower

A senior portfolio manager at Ensign Peak Advisors for roughly nine years, Nielsen filed a confidential complaint received by the IRS on 21 November 2019 alleging the Church had amassed about $100 billion in accounts intended for charitable purposes. His twin brother Lars supplied a 74-page synopsis to reporters. Nielsen gave a sworn declaration in the Huntsman case in 2021, a 90-page memorandum to the Senate Finance Committee in January 2023, and a '60 Minutes' interview in May 2023, in which he called the fund 'really a clandestine hedge fund.'

JH

James Huntsman

b. 1970

Plaintiff, tithing fraud suit

Brother of former Utah governor Jon Huntsman Jr., he resigned his membership in 2020 and sued the Corporation of the President in March 2021 for the return of more than $5 million in tithing, alleging the Church defrauded members about how tithing was spent on City Creek Center and the Beneficial Life bailout. His case was dismissed, partly revived by a 2-1 panel of the Ninth Circuit in August 2023, then dismissed again by an eleven-judge en banc panel.

GC

Gérald Caussé

b. 1963

Presiding Bishop

As Presiding Bishop, Caussé oversees the Church's financial, real estate and investment operations, and Ensign Peak is supervised by the Presiding Bishopric. He published a 2018 article and Q&A on Church finances defending reserves by analogy to the parable of the talents, and gave a rare interview in February 2020 in which the Presiding Bishopric said the Church's combined humanitarian and welfare aid was approaching $1 billion a year.

Wikipedia Image: CC BY-SA 4.0 — Leslie Nilsson

DQ

D. Michael Quinn

1944–2021

Historian of Mormon wealth

Quinn's The Mormon Hierarchy: Wealth and Corporate Power (2017) is the fullest scholarly reconstruction of Church finances from the 1830s to 2010, built from published conference reports, foreign regulatory filings and corporate records. He reprinted the April 1949 and April 1959 financial reports as appendices, reconstructed the 1959–62 deficits, and traced the corporate structure. Excommunicated in 1993, he worked outside institutional access for the rest of his career.

Wikipedia