I have never thought that the Uniting Church would be competing with the Australian Taxation Office but now they are…
According to The Australian Financial Review, the church said in a submission to the Senate committee inquiry into corporate tax avoidance that it had hired a former Australian Federal Police and AUSTRAC officer on a short-term contract to map Glencore’s structure in Australia.
The church’s Victorian social justice spokesman Mark Zirnsak told the newspaper Glencore had been in its sights for some time, but its investigation was “not a witch hunt”.
“We’ve been aware of concerns around them and allegations [over tax] keep coming up,” Mr Zirnsak said.
“There is a view that if a multinational company is suspected of tax dodging in one jurisdiction, it is worthy of examination as to whether that extends across other parts of their operation globally.”
Hopefully they are better at acting as a revenue collector than running a church. Try this for running a church into the ground.
According to the National Church Life Survey, attendance at Uniting churches dropped 11% from 1991 to 1996, 11% from 1996 to 2001 and 40% from 1991 to 2011.
So it looks like a trend of losing 11% every 5 years for 20 years.
The surveys show the Uniting church are losing attenders faster than any other church by a pretty far margin.
A church that had 250,000 attending in 1977 now has 97,000 and if the 20 year trend contines will be under 40,000 by 2050.
A church that is all but falling apart should probably think about where the spend its money wisely and not to employ “a former Australian Federal Police and AUSTRAC officer on a short-term contract to map Glencore’s structure in Australia.”
Perhaps leave that to the 23,259 employees (at June 2014) that the Australia Taxation office have.
By the way, in 2075 there will be more employees in the Australia Taxation Office than people who attend a Uniting Church
TaxRambling.com 
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