Undoing Financial Accountability

In a previous post, I noted that financial accountability in my old city Church was dismantled step by step. Here I outline some of those steps -- too simply I might add -- and not necessarily all of them. It may be useful to other Churches, if they recognise the trend here:

• Still under my ministry, finance officers installed a bogus auditor
• They refused to attend meetings of a Finance Committee, ordered by the Church
• Signatories began to appoint signatories, instead of the Church
• Signatories signed a bank mandate prohibiting anyone else viewing bank activity
• Finance officers proposed electronic transfers, visible only to signatories
• Finance officers withheld conditions of lease, including the purchase of the Church
• The Church's non-profit application was unlawfully sunk and kept sunk
• The constitution was changed to allow the option of an audit or a review
• The audit was dropped in favour of the review
• The reviewer was legally prohibited from passing judgement on the Church finances
• Major proposals for accountability by consultant, regulator, and bank were disregarded

OBSERVATION: This reverses the direction that members were travelling under my ministry. This is not a small back-street Church, but potentially worth many, many millions to anyone who might have that interest in it. Undoing financial accountability in such a context defies good sense. If any point above is incorrect, drop me a note and I will correct it. The overall picture seems clear.

POSTSCRIPT: As best I know, a number of processes are still looking into the above.