Ward listed as the donor?

In a recent audit, a ward had around 40 donations without a donor name, rather the ward name was listed as the donor. Is there ever a good reason to not input a specific donor name?

I understand that for anonymous donations you can select 'anonymous' in MLS, and for donations from non-members it's fairly easy to create a name of a donor not part of the unit. For donations that come from a business and/or organization one could just create a new name in MLS.

I'm puzzled why the ward would have thought to start leaving out names for donations that came outside the unit. I recall the clerk saying it was for tax purposes of some sort, and he and the bishop told me it had always been done that way. Has anyone else ever come across this? This is the first time I have come across this, and I didn't know what to say. There may be a good reason for it, but I can't think of one...so I appreciate any insight out there. Thanks.

Wild guess: this was the unused portion of an advance for an activity. The clerks processing them were concerned that it would affect the tax receipt of the person returning the funds - that is, it would show as a charitable donation when in fact it was the ward's money being returned.

However, as long as the funds are correctly placed into "Budget", they do not show up on "donor's" tax statement. Getting a tax receipt for donations to "budget" went away along with the "ward budget dinner".

I have not seen any such thing before. russellhltn's guess makes some sense but I don't know why there would be 40 such returns. In any case, the donation recorded should match what's on the donation slip (unless the slip lists two members like a husband and wife--then only one of the two can be selected). Doing otherwise should be an audit exception. To correct the exception the ward should go back, find the slips and correct the donors.

eblood66 wrote:I have not seen any such thing before.

I seem to remember this as standard practice before - probably in the days of FIS. (The DOS-based financial program.)