On 1 October 1993, the Church of Scientology obtained tax exemption from the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS). This ended 26 years of what the Church itself has described as a "war" against the IRS, in which it used extraordinary and in many cases illegal tactics - bugging of government offices, theft of mountains of classified files, private detectives pursuing senior government officials, thousands of lawsuits, full-page attack adverts in US daily newspapers, and so on.
So perhaps it is not such a great surprise that the settlement itself came about in some very unusual circumstances, raising questions about the actions of both the Church of Scientology and the IRS. Neither party has been willing to provide answers, with the IRS refusing to disclose the terms of the exemption agreement in defiance of a court order and US taxation law. But with the leak in December 1997 of the secret agreement, the relationship between Scientology and the IRS is under greater scrutiny now than ever before.
These pages, whilst not making a judgement on whether the Church legitimately earned its tax exemption, are intended to be a clearing house for reports and court records on the Scientology vs IRS controversy.
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Last updated 7 February 1998
by Chris Owen (chriso@lutefisk.demon.co.uk)