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	Archdiocese May Eliminate Parish Bookeeping and Centralize Accounting By Tim Townsend St. Louis Post-Dispatch January 12, 2007 http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/religion/story/B1B68ACEAC838A60862572610017CADF?OpenDocument St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke is considering taking over bookkeeping for all 197 parishes in the archdiocese, modernizing a structure that's lasted for centuries. His challenge will be to make the accounting of church money more efficient without giving the impression of a power grab. "This is not about trust, it's not about Big Brother looking over their shoulders," said Frank Chauvin, chief financial officer for the archdiocese. "It's about making sure things are done right, and it's about accountability with parishioners." New technology and mounting pressure from the laity since the beginning of the clergy abuse scandal five years ago — which has cost the church millions of dollars — has spurred leaders to update financial controls, according to scholars and financial consultants. "There's a growing sensibility toward better stewardship and strict accounting," said Francis J. Butler, president of Foundations and Donors Interested in Catholic Activities. "We've been through four to five years of public scandals that in some cases were linked to embezzlement and misuse of funds." Burke has yet to approve the centralization plan, which Chauvin said would happen in phases. Chauvin said Burke will talk to the heads of the archdiocese's deaneries, or geographical clusters of parishes, before he approves the move. A reorganization as complicated as what's being proposed could take two or three years, and parishes would be expected to help pay for the new system. While some dioceses around the country have centralized their payroll systems, St. Louis would be among the first to implement such an ambitious reorganization of its accounting. St. Louis "would be on the vanguard," said Thomas Brennan, director of finance for the Archdiocese of Chicago, another diocese that has begun centralizing its accounting. The proposed reorganization comes on the heels of a two-year battle in which Burke was accused by some in the archdiocese of trying to seize control of the assets of St. Stanislaus Kostka Church, north of downtown. Archdiocesan officials stress that was not the case with St. Stanislaus, nor is it the case with the current proposal. Internal archdiocesan documents obtained by the Post-Dispatch show its leaders are anxious about negative reaction from priests and the public. "Whether or not there will be a public relations nightmare is dependent on whether the pastors will support the Archbishop in his decision to implement centralized accounting," reads one of the documents. In another document, dated Nov. 21, the archdiocese's director of internal audit, Michael J. Duffy, writes that centralized accounting is necessary because audits of parish finances in recent years "have found serious problems in financial reporting, internal controls, regulatory reporting (IRS), and fraud/embezzlement." Duffy also writes that "many parishes do not have adequate reserves to fund current operations or 'surprises' that may occur." A recent Villanova University survey of diocesan chief financial officers found that 85 percent of Catholic dioceses had found evidence of embezzlement in the past five years. The St. Louis Archdiocese did not participate in the Villanova survey, but church officials said that in the past five years, eight cases of fraud, theft or embezzlement were reported in the archdiocese. Still, one of the documents goes to great lengths to dispel the notion that the centralization would be solely a response to fraud. "The primary objective of centralized accounting is NOT to deal with the misuse of funds in a few parishes," it says. In the Roman Catholic Church, every pastor is in charge of his own parish finances, including payroll, accounts receivable and payable and cash accounts. Pastors are advised by parish finance councils, made up of lay people. Each parish is run as its own entity and is taxed by the diocese to help support its various agencies and programs. The St. Louis Archdiocese employs around 10,000 people. In financial terms, with 2006 revenues of $515 million, it's bigger than Build-A-Bear Workshop, Inc. ($362 million) but smaller than Panera Bread ($640 million), based on those companies' 2005 revenues. More than half the archdiocese's revenues ($278 million) come from its parishes. The document prepared by Duffy says that "many parishes continue to employ bookkeepers who are not qualified to oversee the financial activities of a parish and or have members of the parish Finance Council who do not have the skills to oversee the finances of the parish." Other internal documents say it will cost most parishes more money to move to centralized accounting. That will depend on the current bookkeeping at each parish, according to Chauvin, and the archdiocese will help parishes that can't afford the centralized service, which would be mandatory for all parishes. The archdiocese began a trial run at centralized accounting in 2005, when it consolidated several parishes in north St. Louis County and put four of them under the direction of one centralized bookkeeping system. That prototype has expanded to include more parishes and parochial schools, and the reaction from initially skeptical priests has been mostly positive. The Rev. Robert T. Rosebrough, pastor of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta parish in Ferguson, one of the initial trial parishes, said both he and his finance council were nervous going in. "It was a tough sell for me, but the loss of control I feared never took place." Some priests in the archdiocese are initially positive about the idea of centralized accounting. "I think it's a wonderful idea," said the Rev. John H. Schneider, pastor of St. Joseph parish in Bonne Terre. "I'm a better theologian than I am accountant, so I'm not afraid of it."
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