Transcription
Hello, I'm Rich Hammer. Each year I write two tax guides for churches and ministers. By far, the longer of the two is the Church and Clergy Tax Guide, which you see right here, weighing in at four pounds. It is a comprehensive reference book covering numerous hundreds of issues pertaining to churches, ministers, and church staff. So it's a reference book that you can use throughout the year. You're not gonna sit in the hammock, simply sipping a lemonade and read this; you know, you want to be sure you put it away after 9 p.m. Yeah, but it's a it's a reference book. So you're gonna find, in 750 pages, you're gonna find the answer to just about any tax question that comes up in the life of the church.
Now, the second tax guide that I do is called the Minister's Tax Guide. I started writing that oh, maybe 15 or 20 years ago. It's a much shorter book; it's only about 75 pages long. It consists of two parts. The first part is literally a line-by-line analysis of how ministers complete their federal tax returns. And then there's also an insert; it's the second part, which covers a church's payroll tax reporting obligations. It's important to know those because there are significant penalties that can be assessed against board members of a church if the church fails to adequately comply with these rules. And I divide those down into what I call a ten-step process, and if you follow that, it's you're pretty assured that you're you're gonna be in compliance with the rules. This book, the shorter book, will not answer most of the questions that arise during the course of the year; it's not meant for that. It's meant for you to have it with you at your desk when you're trying to fill out your own taxes.
Many ministers get paid tax return preparers to fill out their tax return; that's okay. But I think many ministers are capable of doing this yourselves. Ministers' taxes, I often say, are not complicated; they're novel or unique. They're unique rules that apply to ministers that kind of tends to make it seemingly confusing and ambiguous, but it's not really. Oh, with with this tax guide, I think many ministers, if not most ministers, should be able to do their own tax return. The Minister's Tax Guide has become very popular over the years, and it's now used by eight major Protestant denominations. And I'm pleased to say that the Assemblies of God was added to that list several years ago, and they make the book available free of charge to any Assemblies of God minister on the AG Financial Solutions website, which is agingfinancial.org.