this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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Ffs. Strip them of their charity status already
I'm not against this. Why haven't any party's picked this up as a policy for this election?
What's the specific policy you're suggesting? At the end of each year, Sanitarium donates all profits to the church.
Would you like to see Churches lose charity status? It's a vote loser for Labour who have a lot of church tithing voters, and it's a donation loser for National who get a lot of money from a small number of churches, plus many (like luxon) are hard core christians.
There is simply no path to removing charity status from churches while 50% of NZ believe in a higher power.
The other option is to stop companies being able to claim charity donations as an expense, which is a good way to kill every major charity.
Good point, not sure what the solution should be but at the moment it does seem like Sanitarium are taking advantage of the current system.
Frankly the last thing we want are bought-and-paid-for politicians deciding what is a charity or not.
The charities commission (I think) are the arbiters of charity status.
IMHO Sanatarium should not be a charity: they should be a non profit: unless profit is their goal of course, which it obviously is.
It seems to skate by with religious affiliation providing the charity status: churches are no more charitable than any other club.
Sanitarium is not a charity, it's your average, normal company (actually two companies).
Seventh-day Adventist Church is a charity. The Charities Act 2005 lists "advancement of education or religion" as a charitable purpose, so the Charities Commission are unlikely to have any say in whether they are a charity unless they can prove the church is a sham.
The reason Sanitarium pays no tax, is because any donation a company makes to a charity is (rightfully) tax deductible. Sanitarium need only donate the amount of money they made as a profit and now they have no tax to pay. Any company could do this, if ANZ donated all their profits to the Cancer Society they would pay no tax. But there would also be nothing for shareholders, so they don't do this.
Because SDA are the shareholders, they pay the profits as a donation instead of a dividend to avoid tax.
The only problem I see in any of that is that churches qualify as charities simply by advancing religion. If you removed that requirement, most small churches are likely to still qualify as charities under either reducing poverty, if they do that, or under the more general benefit to the community so long as they do something that is actually beneficial. Many small churches do actual charitable things for their communities, but I think large ones would have a harder time proving their community value.
I'm generally not against a charity being able to invest spare cash to better fund future years, but my opinions on things are pretty easily swayed 😆
Yeah, totally glossed over the actual structure of sanatarium and SDA. Very relevant, TY.
If a club does charitable activity, then by all means they should qualify as a charity. Just because they happen to worship something and call themselves a church is not enough in my opinion.
I'm looking at the prosperity mega churches like Destiny and Arise. Those bad apples spoil the bunch.
Our conservative majority parties are definitely not going to turn off a huge donation source, so nothing will change.