Money

The 2011 survey did not ask about money directly, which is itself a sign of how the issue has grown. It surfaced anyway, as one of the most common themes in the written comments, and almost always with the same example. "The fact that the church is funding a billion-dollar mall in SLC, while millions of Saints don't have clean water to drink, was/is sickening to me." "Why aren't the financial records of the church public?"

Since then the questions have been answered, mostly by outsiders. In December 2019 a former employee of the Church's investment arm, Ensign Peak Advisors, filed a complaint with the IRS stating that the fund held about $100 billion, had grown for decades on tithing surplus, and had made no charitable distributions. In February 2023 the Securities and Exchange Commission fined the Church and Ensign Peak $5 million for having concealed the size of the portfolio through shell companies with borrowed signatures; the Church acknowledged the settlement and said it regretted the mistakes. Lawsuits by members seeking the return of tithing followed.

What makes this a reason for leaving rather than a grievance is the way tithing is enforced. A member who does not pay ten percent of income cannot enter the temple, and until 2020 could not attend a child's wedding. Respondents who learned that the institution collecting under that condition was sitting on a fortune it had hidden from them described the discovery in the same terms they used for the history: not that the Church was wealthy, but that they had been lied to.