Good point Wynski.

With over 12 million illegal aliens here I have to agree. But I am hopeful our current administration’s activities show good change might be coming.

Jere,

Under US law it is illegal to commit fraud or misrepresentation in proceedings with the government. A friend told me she has personally witnessed many, many instances of staff submitting false information in government proceedings and lying under oath in same. She tells me if any of them are caught doing this in immigration proceedings the defrauder can be kicked out of America permanently. She said she’s seen many instances of such fraud.

So, I’d hope our government would go after them all and maybe even see this as grounds to rescind the cult’s tax exempt status.

Wynski, a closed group then becomes a religious community, like a monastery or convent, or a communitarian religious group, which puts it in a different non-profit category. There are IRS cases that hinged on that distinction. It’s the same sort of principle that also applies to the more extreme example of “private churches,” typically though not always a mail-order “minister” and immediate family trying to claim exemption. There are distinctions, or every private group with some religious or spiritual component, like the Shriners or the Knights of Columbus, would be able to claim full-blown “church” exemptions.

There’s an article that discusses a lot of this:

The Tax Exempt Status of Communitarian Religious Organizations:
https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1876&context=faculty_scholarship

Note that Meade Emory, the lead author, has advised Scientology, and some of the language about the accumulation of funds “to finance an organization’s expansion” sounds like a virtual blueprint for Miscavige’s strategy. However, the article also notes that “an extremely small number of members or an accumulation of funds far in excess of those needed to meet operating costs” are also grounds for suspicion, and at some point Scientology will be in such flagrant violation of such principles that its current status will be indefensible.

I’ve never seen that in the IRS regs (property being open to all). Religions have a right to choose who they allow in. IF that is part of their “creed”

Wynski, I think the CofS is also in jeopardy on an implicit requirement to be open to the public, part actually of the requirement not to provide private benefits (which can be to a group, not just individual inurement such as to a leader). They are starting to operate more like a closed religious community (yet another non-profit category with different requirements and restrictions) or private club as they focus on catering to existing membership, particularly “whales,” and cease to have any meaningful outreach or actual recruitment.

The Shriners, for instance, don’t get to be a church just because they hold some arguably spiritual beliefs, and have charitable endeavors like driving around in miniatures cars under the aegis or raising money for hospitals.

My best guess is that the IRS will eventually challenge Scientology on multiple points – and possibly just settle for downgrading them to a more restrictive non-profit status as a first step, all of which would require them to start making financial filings.

By breaking the rules for religious orgs to give back to society they might be breaking the law. I’m not entirely sure. Mike would know more precisely.

Glenn quoted:”the organization’s purposes and activities may not be illegal or violate fundamental public policy.”

AFAICT, the government EXPECTS witnesses to lie to them in certain circumstances, so simply lying is weak sauce for them to pursue.That scientologists lie, must lie, can’t not lie is pretty firmly established to anyone who has scratched the surface more than a little bit and discovered that the “gold” plating is on festering excrement. PROVING hat they’re lying(intentionally, with malice aforethought) is SUCH an expensive undertaking for no significant “reward” (bureaucratically, that is.) Even if they “win”, the Government loses such cases., as the scn spin masters would turn it into another case of “religious persecution”, which trumps (so to speak) all reasoned explanations to the contrary. The IRS is particularly susceptible to that because they’ve already admitted to targeting scientologists BECAUSE they admitted to being scientologists, Charging “donations” to scn enterprises as ‘charitable contributions’, and such.

Skyler, scn is actually late getting into the game of robocalls. I get a few that I can ID. Typically, I note the “spoofed caller ID, often a fake # from a town in my area code.I pick up and check to see if anyone’s saying anything. If not, I’ll say:”You can’t sell anything if you don’t say anything.” sometime,s they will speak in a thick accent, at which point, I’ll ask for someone who speaks English as their primary language. For one customer-service Co I’d worked for, since outsourced to India, that meant getting transferred to our building in the US [yup, snarky]. In the case of a Flag robo-call, I got transferred to a guy I’d heard about before I’d gone off to Flag, still doing the “reg” thing while I’m happily retired about 50 years later. Sadly, I suspect he’ll be the LAST reg to hang up his phone.