Adventist Today Foundation

“Board members Loren Seibold and Carmen Seibold are married to each other. The wife of board member Bjorn Karlman was paid for news reporting part of the year. Paul Richardson is related through his wife to the man who served as accountant through Sep 2021 and the woman who did office work and kept track of donations for Adventist Today through Sep 2021.”

“New bylaws were voted in Feb 2022.”

“In Sep 2021, we discovered that Adventist Today Foundation funds (restricted donations) had been sent elsewhere by Paul Richardson without board consultation or approval. See more details in the explanation for Part IV, #26.”

“The board members all received copies of Form 990 for 2021 shortly before the board meeting of Oct 9, 2022, and the Form submission on Oct 14, 2022. They could ask questions about the Form during the board meeting on Oct 9, 2022, and could email questions before (or after) the meeting.”

“Payments to officers and contractors were not discussed until after Paul Richardson left as CEO. After he left, Bill Garber chaired the board that budgeted rates to be paid to everyone. Starting in October 2021, the board was alerted to pay rates.”

“Adventist Today did not make its governing documents, conflict-of-interest policy, and financial statements available to the public during the tax year, probably mostly because apparently no one has asked to see them. During 2021 we did not use conflict of interest policy statements. We can easily send a pdf of governing documents and financial statements to those who ask for them. As this amended Form 990 is being filed in July 2023 (and now again in November 2023), the organization has been making changes in its website, and we will investigate how to make documents more easily accessible to the public on the website, or how to alert readers that they can request such information.”

“We discovered that we had filled out some of the financial figures the wrong way, mostly dealing with the reporting of investment activity. Some of the information in the supporting schedules was either in a wrong schedule or with incorrect figures (investment activity distinguishing interest/dividends and unrealized/realized capital gains). The ending net assets balances were correct, but Parts I, VIII, and X were not correctly filled out.”

“The figures shown for the various program services include allocations of the Information technology and Miscellaneous program expenses shown in Part IX. No revenue is attributed to any particular program service, as there are no subscription fees for any of them. Adventist Today relies on donations instead of charging its readers.”

“After Sep 2021, Adventist Today stopped producing AT1 videos. Expense of $42,080 for AT1 had been incurred to that point in 2021.”

“Adventist Today used cash method accounting until Sep 2021, when new management and a new accountant took over and changed to accrual accounting (reposting the Jan to Sep 2021 accounting entries) to better match expenses to when they are incurred and to show actual cash on hand. This resulted in a restatement of the prior year ending net assets, as some payments and cleared checks of 2021 were 2020 expenses but had not been deducted from the 2020 net assets. We show the prior-period correction in Part XI.”