Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [30]
After a few weeks, the new finance person arrived on post and I was introduced to him as the Treasury Secretary. I went along with it and no one said anything different. No posting order, no red tape. I had just decided to help and it became my official post.
I did well with my new title. Besides being good with numbers, I really liked money! I did all the payroll, checks, and bills, kept all the files, did bank deposits, etc. I became extremely skilled on issues that had to do with business taxes and how filings for the IRS were done. It was 1989, I was 16 years old and doing taxes for an international company that made hundreds of thousands of dollars, probably millions actually. There was a huge project going on at the Complex, called the Audits Tax Force. The tax force was comprised of different treasury staff from organizations all over the place that were responsible for the tax filings for their organization. Everything within the tax project was reviewed by two staff members, Ellen Reynolds and Coby Knight. They worked in the Int Finance Office and were regarded as the gods of taxes in Scientology. There were rules we had to follow to make sure that all of the laws were being adhered to in terms of taxes being taken out of pay, and which staff members were under a certain age. There were hundreds of kids throughout the Sea Organization who were under-age and they had lists of all of them! I saw the list once and it was pages and pages long. I was told that those kids were worth more than they were being paid in a year just in terms of a tax write off! I was amazed at how much paperwork there was involved in dealing with taxes.
There was one point where it was debated that ABLE Int staff members should not be getting minimum wage because the other Sea Org units weren’t paid even a fraction of minimum wage. They were paid $35 per week. For a few weeks, I was instructed to make out all of the payroll checks to the staff, and then have them sign the checks back over to the organization. This way, the money was paid out on the books, but the staff would “donate” it back to the institution. The first week I tried this was a nightmare. First, the staff weren’t going along with the idea very well. The few who did endorse their checks told me that they would be reporting this to the Executive Director, Rena Weinberg. Then, when I got to the bank to deposit the few checks I had, the teller gave me a weird look and brought her supervisor over. He flat out refused to deposit the checks. He explained to me that you cannot have employees sign over checks back to the company. Big no-no. I ended up giving everybody back their checks and telling them it was a big mistake.
Later, when I went back to the Audits Tax Force, they told me that the minimum wage would continue at ABLE Int until something else was sorted out. There was too much scrutiny from the IRS to screw everything up on behalf of the Association for Better Living and Education’s tiny payroll.
One day while sitting at my desk someone came up to my cubicle and said “Hey!”
It was Jesse Radstrom. He had been posted in Clearwater, Florida for the last year or so and I had not seen him once. He was in LA?
“Hey, man!” I said as I shook his hand. ”What the hell are you doing here?”
“I’m here getting my clearances so I can go to Int,” he said.
“Wow, some big shot we have here, folks!” I answered back.
We chatted for a few minutes and then he said that he had to go. We would meet on Hollywood Blvd and grab a bite of pizza for dinner.