update: church member at my job wants help raising money for a bad idea

It’s a special “where are you now?” season at Ask a Manager and I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.

There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.

Remember the letter-writer whose colleague at their church wanted help raising money for a bad idea? Here’s the update.

This is a funky follow-up.

First, as I went about learning more about the situation with Laurel’s mission, I was told that Laurel does have some experience pertinent to the “tree planting mission field.” (As an aside, some commenters on the original post got bogged down in the exact details of tree planting, and I’d like to remind everyone that it’s an anonymizing fiction.)

When I talked to my manager about what I learned from following up on a member’s request for me to look for grants that would help support Laurel, I was told that it was none of my business and that I shouldn’t have done it at all, as it was not explicitly stated in my job description.

I talked to the committee the church has organized to support Laurel’s work. One reassuring thing I heard was that the committee had been encouraging her to wind down her work in Chile and transfer it to local leadership for several years. There’s a specific thing she does, say it’s teaching people how to test soil for suitability for trees, that is unusual in that country and would be helpful for local people to incorporate into future tree planting work. There is a professional in the field on her committee, and I trust her judgement when she speaks to this thing’s value. Passing this specific thing on was the primary aim of the most recent trip she took, which happened after I sent the first email to Alison. It was pointed to me all that work of this nature has some degree of inefficiencies. That’s both true and Laurel’s is on the extreme of tolerated inefficiencies.

I held Laurel’s bookkeeping high regard despite this conflict. She works as an independent contractor for many small churches maintaining their books, as she does for our church. I certainly hold them less highly now! It came to light that she made a $7,000 error while submitting our church’s taxes. It was a technological issue, and she’s not very adept with computers, nor did she take me up on my many offers to help in many different ways (remember that I had been doing the books before this, so I did know how to fix this!). Laurel also pushed for a specialized bookkeeper to come in and clean up the books after my time with them (and in my defense, I was working with an outside bookkeeping firm who was supposed to be doing the more technical parts of the work, and apparently weren’t doing a good job). This bookkeeper cost our church $15,000 over three months. I have no idea if that’s a reasonable sum for a contract bookkeeper, but shouldn’t Laurel have been able to handle the clean-up as part of her work if she’s such a lauded bookkeeper? Not coincidentally, our church has been in the red this year for the first time in a century’s operation to the tune of exactly $22,000.

Even more frustrating, given that it’s been emphasized to me again and again that Laurel knows what she’s doing and I should trust her, is that she’s not correctly doing the books for money related to her mission. Missionaries are considered clergy for the purpose of taxes. If they are paid directly by the church, they are an employee and the church needs to file the appropriate payroll taxes and file documentation to report that they have employed this person as an employee. It’s pretty common for missionaries to direct any funds they’ve raised to an outside organization who can handle the legal and financial aspects of their work. Laurel has skipped this entirely! I know from doing the books for one mission trip of hers that money comes into the account of the church from donations and payments go directly out to her, with nothing taken out. This leaves our church in the position of having underpaid payroll taxes for decades. When I brought this up to Laurel’s committee, the general response was that it’s all so complicated, how could anyone be expected to know what was required financially around Laurel’s mission? But if Laurel is a bookkeeper with a specialization in small churches, shouldn’t she have known this? From what I can tell, the amount of donations that came in was the amount that was paid out to her, meaning that there weren’t overpayments. Until she took over as bookkeeper last year, our church’s bookkeeper (not her) managed these payments. She’s provided financial reports to the church every year. The one good thing I could say about the external bookkeeper is that if they did the deep dive into the books they were paid for, financial impropriety (beyond Laurel conveniently not paying taxes on her work!) would have turned up.

I struggle to understand all of this. Why no one pointed out that being paid money to go somewhere and do work means that you’re an employee and need to pay taxes in the last few decades Laurel’s been doing this isn’t something I understand. While I don’t have training in bookkeeping, I found what seemed to me to be pretty clear answers to that in a quick google. There was a lot of discussion with me about how poorly I was doing with the books while they were my responsibility, and it’s been made clear to me that part of what allowed me to keep my job is because Laurel’s taken over the financial aspects of the church’s administration. There’s this story of me as a colossal fuck-up with the church’s books. But from what’s been shared with me and what I’ve seen, the primary origin of that story is Laurel! I didn’t get payments and reports to her about her work’s financials to her as quickly as she wanted, and I know that deeply annoyed her. While there certainly may be errors that I may have made as bookkeeper that are beyond my ability to understand, what I can say for my work is that I always filed taxes and report on time, and certainly never cost our church thousands of dollars because I was too stubborn to admit I didn’t understand how to fix a technology problem with the filing system. The $22,000 in the red really grieves me. It is a hard thing for a small church to come back from that kind of deficit.

I’m much younger than Laurel, I’m much newer to the church, I have this story of deeply fucking up the books and so costing the meeting tens of thousands of dollar attached to me. I’ve talked to many people about this problem, and no one’s interested in taking this on. Probably not least because if the church paid the back payroll taxes, that would cost us thousands of dollars when we’re already in the hole!

At the end of the day, Laurel’s planted more doomed trees, she’s continuing on unquestioned, and I can’t get another couch for the office because there isn’t the money for it. I’m staying in this job becauses its very mellow and flexible part time work that accommodates my disability in a way that’s hard to replicate. There’s some things about it that drive me absolutely crazy, there’s some things I find deeply meaningful. I’m planning to leave this job in the next year, and I’ll take with me a lot of lessons about how even well-meaning organizations can go hugely astray.

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