$100 Billion (Redux)

So Wednesday, David Nielson, the whistleblower who sent a complaint to the IRS about the Mormon church’s tax-exempt investment arm a handful of years ago, sent a revised and significantly polished update to the Senate Finance Committee.

For context: Ensign Peak Advisors is an investment company. Its sole (as far as I can tell) client: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (that is, the Mormon church). It manages something in the range of $100 billion of the church’s assets. And also, Ensign Peak Advisors is a tax-exempt organization.

Mr. Nielson has argued for a variety of reasons that it should not be exempt (because, among other things, it fails the organizatonal and operational tests (and in this round he added a private inurement claim).

Reading through this round, I think I understand his assertions. And I think they boil down to his misunderstanding certain transactions and terms of art. But I gave a more fulsome analysis of my thoughts on Twitter.

(He also makes some securities law claims, claims that I’m not qualified to comment on and which, honestly, also probably depend intimately on the underlying facts.)

Samuel D. Brunson

Photo by Ken Lund. CC BY-SA 2.0