rongo

I never said anything about "exact same account numbers." The local ward checking accounts on up the chain all interface with and draw from the Church's checking account. The scenario you are envisioning would require 33,000+ separate checking accounts for wards and branches alone. Who monitors and transfers money if/when some of these get overdrawn (our stake has high councilors audit our assigned wards, and one of my wards overspent their budget last year)? Bishop Burton was saying that this is never a factor (except for on paper, and when discussing why they spent more money than they were given), because all of the checking accounts in the Church tap into the one checking account for the Church. He also emphasized that even fast offering is only an on-paper category, as far as that account goes. Which should be obvious to anyone who's issued checks. The boxes of checks with the routing and account numbers are used to reimburse YW leaders for activities (ward budget), pay an electric bill (fast offerings), etc. We don't have different checkbooks with different account numbers for different category expenditures, because we only use the ward's checking account for all of these. Same as the Church, whether they are buying temple furniture for Bangkok, paying $10 million to the NAACP, or buying a property. According to Bishop Burton, it's the same checking account from the top down (even if, for purposes of daily local transactions, this account is tied to accounts through Zion's, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Dresdner Bank, etc.). [quote]And then we have places like Ensign Peak, who obviously move around church funds into multiple places. Are those not considered accounts? [/quote] I don't think this matters when Ensign Peak money is put into the checking account (the account the Church uses to pay for everything) to be available to be spent. When that happens, there aren't separate categories like "from tithing only," "tithing interest dividends," etc. Doesn't Ensign Peak "move around church funds into multiple places" using the checking account? How else would it "move funds around?"

I think what Bishop Burton meant was that the various deposit accounts (Zion's Bank, BofA, Wells Fargo, Dresdner Bank, or whatever) all sweep into the Church's account. And vice versa --- the checking accounts all sweep from the one Church account. His explanation made a lot of sense to me. The Church doesn't have zillions of employees constantly transferring money back and forth between innumerable local and international accounts. These accounts all sweep into or out of the Church's checking account. Elder Anderson has said one of the big holdups to the Church getting into China (formally) is a CCP requirement that no Chinese donations leave the country.

There really is only one checking account in the Church. As Bishop Burton explained (it was in answer to my question at a bishops' Q&A), it would be crazy to envision countless accounts that have to constantly send debits and credits back and forth. All of the money in the Church (liquid, fungible money) is thrown into one big bucket, and any check written in the Church is drawn from this one account. There are internal "categories" for bookkeeping purposes (like at the local level: the "other" accounts, budget categories, etc. --- but there really is just the ward's checking account, despite these internal categories that are on paper only). I think it was unwise and silly for the Church to treat "no tithing money was ever used for XYZ" as a hill to die on. It doesn't bother me that tithing money was used, for one thing, and it looks like tortured mental gymnastics to continue to treat "on paper only" internal categories as physically separate accounts. ETA: Bishop Burton went so far as to say that there aren't even separate accounts for fast offerings and tithing. My question was how it works when a bishop writes a fast offering check on January 1, but Sunday isn't until January 6, so there aren't any donations yet. Is this money "floated" or transferred until then? He said that this isn't how it works at all. There is only one giant account on which all checks are drawn. All income coming into the coffers goes into one account. He said there is never any danger that a check will "bounce," because there are billions in the one Church account.