Religion is big business. At least 82% of South Africans identify themselves as being religious. Religious institutions own vast swathes of property. Some receive many millions in donations and revenue from business activities. Most pay no taxes at all - even employees' salaries are tax- exempt, and some receive seven-figure sums.
The religious sector is a substantial part of the SA economy. Its institutions are also an important part of civil society - a premise used to countenance its tax-exempt status. Yet the financial position and business management of these institutions are little understood.
The FM has attempted to construct a picture of this. But it has been difficult. In general, religious institutions have proved themselves to be opaque or grudgingly co-operative. Strangely, despite the fact that their tax-exempt status means that every tax payer effectively subsidises their access to social services, there is no legal obligation on religious institutions to disclose publicly their financial affairs. Many don't seem to recognise a moral obligation to disclose, either, even to their own members and donors.
The formal oversight of the sector is dysfunctional and haphazard. Only the SA Revenue Service (Sars) appears to effectively collect financial information on those registered as public benefit organisations, but it was unable to disclose any of this information to the FM. Apart from financial information, information on basic governance and auditing procedures was generally unavailable.
WHAT IT MEANS
 No legal obligation to open books to scrutiny
Formal oversight of institutions deficient
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The FM has developed this story as information has trickled in over the past nine months.
Earlier this year the FM approached representatives of the Catholics, the Methodists, the Apostolic Faith Mission, Rhema Ministries, the SA Council of Churches (SACC), Muslims, Hindus, Orthodox Jews, Buddhists and the Zion Christian Church (ZCC).
We asked for information on their tax status, governance structures, oversight mechanisms, financial information (such as the sources and amount of income, spending, value of net assets and amount spent on salaries).
The results were mixed.
In some instances we were led on with promises of information which never materialised. In other instances there was no information at all. Some, it must be said, did provide us with good-quality information, quickly.
Worryingly, there is no protection for people who are taken advantage of by corrupt or greedy institutions.
In the US, by contrast, concern over excessive personal gain has prompted an investigation in the US into the lifestyles of larger-than-life televangelists.
Ray McCauley, the founder of the charismatic Rhema Ministries in SA, says there has been a lot of concern in SA religious circles over the lack of regulation of "fly-by-night" churches.
McCauley says it's widely known that many churches which fall under those identifying themselves as being African instituted churches (the largest of which is the Zion Christian Church or ZCC) - usually little more than a small gathering of people in parks or other open spaces - are constituted entirely for the personal gain of the lay preacher.
They con economically vulnerable people such as domestic workers and casual day-labourers into donating money they can't afford, and then disappear.
Mark Kingon, GM responsible for operational support at Sars, says Sars is in the process of creating a publicly accessible database of institutions that are registered as tax-exempt. This would be to create a reference database in which donors can have confidence.
But, he cautions, the information that would be made available once the list is complete would be limited and unlikely to include sensitive financial information.
Surprisingly, Sars says it generates no statistics on how much income is tax-exempt in SA.
This approach is quite different from how the US's Internal Revenue Service (IRS) goes about the business of public benefit organisations (which includes religious institutions) and the information it makes available on them.
A vast database, known as GuideStar, has been created from IRS filings and holds information, including financial statements and governance guidelines.
For a fee, GuideStar does charity verification, compensation benchmarking, research, qualification, market analysis, outreach, development and oversight.
There are 1,7m organisations registered with it, and it says it has more than 120 000 NGOs which provide information beyond what is on their IRS listings.
The website gets at least 8m visitors annually.
Bob Ottenhoff, president and CE of GuideStar, says the users have a variety of reasons for turning to GuideStar "but all of them turn to us because they need reliable, extensive non profit information.
"They believe in GuideStar because they understand the need for confidence in the non profit sector."
This is not unique to the US. In the UK there is the Charity Commission; in Scotland there is the office of the Scottish charity regulator that monitors behaviour within the charity sector, which includes religious institutions. Annual reports are supposed to be filed within nine months of the institution's year end.
This sounds a lot like the work that is supposed to be done in SA by the non profit organisation (NPO) directorate, housed within the department of social development. But one veteran of the sector describes the directorate as "two men with briefcases and a fax machine".
The directorate does appear to be overwhelmed. The handful of files that the FM requested - like those on the Randburg branch of the Rhema Church and on the huge Zion Christian Church and its associated chamber of commerce - were incomplete or unavailable. The NPO Act of 1997 requires information to be filed. The directorate had numerous excuses - the department's database was being moved to a digital format and it might have been somewhere in that process, but there was apparently no way to track this. The other explanation offered was that the institutions may never have filed the information.
Mapena Bok, the chief director of the directorate, says more than 42 000 institutions are registered with it, each of which should have a file containing some basic financial information. NPOs are meant to file two reports annually, a financial report and a narrative report, within nine months of the organisation's year-end.
Bok does not deny his task is enormous.
But many churches are not registered as NPOs at all. "Registration with the NPO directorate is voluntary," he says.
So why register with the directorate then? Bok says that by registering with the directorate, an NPO undertakes to meet certain governance obligations. That should provide some confidence to donors, suppliers and other organisations which may work with an NPO.
So market pressure should be an incentive for registration for those organisations that would benefit from the credibility given by registration. This makes intuitive sense in the case of most charity-like institutions, which have to assure donors that their money will be well used. But it is doubtful that church members choose their religious institutions the way donors choose which charity to give money to.
If the directorate discovers illegal activity, it is obliged to "refer the NPO to the SA Police Service for criminal investigation if satisfied that any noncompliance may constitute an offence", according to the act.
It used to be that if an NPO wanted to qualify as a public benefit organisation and become tax-exempt, it first had to register with the directorate before it could apply to Sars for exemption.
Consequently, all PBOs were obliged to make their financial statements available for public scrutiny, at least in theory. But last June, the SACC successfully lobbied for registration with the directorate to be bypassed so that institutions could register directly with Sars.
The SACC and its members successfully argued that churches were not raising funds from the public - their members were all affiliated with a specific institution and contributed money on a voluntary basis. Therefore there was no need to protect the public at large from institutions that only a very small base of people took donations from. Of course, that ignores the fact that a tax-exempt status implies a de facto involuntary donation by every SA citizen to the religious sector.
Doug Tilton, the associate for communication at the SACC, adds that there were also complaints from its members about the pace at which NPO applications were processed. That had caused complications at tax-filing season.
As a result, the NPO directorate is slipping further into obscurity.
Tilton says oversight over the NPO sector should be undertaken by the sector itself. "Membership bases should hold institutions accountable," he says.
But that does not mean that Tilton is for keeping financial records secret - he readily volunteers the SACC's financials, which are published in an annual report printed for its members.
"Some churches would appreciate the legal backing [obliging public disclosure] to enforce better record keeping. Churches usually operate on voluntary labour, which means it is usually a congregant who acts as the church's treasurer," Tilton says.
The SACC says it wants greater compliance "and there should be greater disclosure - much greater transparency".
The SACC's objection to registering with the directorate was also based on an objection to complexity as well as the administrative burden.
Tilton says the SACC is in the very early stages of promoting the idea of creating an oversight body along the lines of the UK's Charity Commission.
Kingon was only vaguely supportive of the same idea.
Meanwhile Bok is positive that once the records are digitised, a new user-friendly database will be available to the public, and the directorate will be relieved of the vast paper burden.
Perhaps then the efficiency objections from religious institutions will become empty.
For the foreseeable future, though, the veil drawn across the finances of the country's religious institutions will remain in place.
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