Finance
Newsletter
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Open Enrollment no longer applies to your voluntary Envoy contribution.
You may now change your voluntary retirement contribution to Envoy at any time. However, there are a couple of implications to be aware of…
This can only be done through Envoy. There is no need to contact WV since this amount is no longer in your budget. Envoy will inform us of the change.
Note, too, that this will change your net salary, since your voluntary Envoy contributions are deducted from your gross Consolidated Salary before we send you your paycheck. If you want to adjust your Consolidated Salary to compensate for a change in your Envoy contribution, you will need to wait until the next Open Enrollment to do that.
Significant change is coming to your disability benefit.
WorldVenture’s long-term disability (LTD) insurance will be completely restructured effective January 1, 2025. You will soon be receiving more details about this from our HR department, but we know this much now…
This newsletter is also published on the GMC for future reference. We know that you have much going on and that keeping up with what is happening in Finance may be another item on a never-ending task list. Thank you in advance for taking some time to read these announcements and for the important work that you do every day. Our hope with sending you this information is not that you become an expert in WV financial matters, but that you are informed of changes that impact you directly, and that you know where to turn if you need help. It is our pleasure to serve alongside you!
Finance is experiencing many transitions. You may have noticed several changes in the team list to the right.
As a reminder for navigating this web-based newsletter, here are some features that we hope you’ll find useful:
Please send us any feedback. We want this tool to be as useful to you as possible. Email us at FinanceHelp@worldventure.com.
Soraya Marin – VP/Chief Operations Officer
Fabian Perea – Treasurer
Luke Oravec – Deputy Treasurer
Christina Segura – Senior Staff Accountant, Europe/MENA & Americas
Dan Penney – Staff Accountant, Africa & Asia
Kriss Reese – Financial Services Manager
Madeline Shanley – Financial Services Specialist
Mary Ackermann – Financial Services Specialist
Becky Binuya – Financial Services Specialist
Renee Chase – Financial Services Specialist
Announcement to expect inaccurate USF balances under certain conditions (Fabian Perea, July 18, 2024)
In the next couple of months, we will be doing some weekly maintenance in our system as we prepare for our annual audit. This weekly maintenance is scheduled from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm, Mountain Daylight Time (GMT-6), and will occur every Friday from July 19th through September 6th, 2024.
During those hours, your GMC Statement reports may not be accurate. We apologize for this inconvenience, but wanted to let you know about this and that reporting inconsistencies are expected during those hours.
Should you have questions about your funds and the related reports outside of the maintenance times, please do not hesitate to contact the Finance department at financehelp@worldventure.com.
Announcement of Lois Huston’s retirement as WV’s tax preparer (Luke Oravec, June 21, 2024)
After serving WorldVenture as our tax preparer for the past six years, Lois Huston has notified us that she is cutting back on her tax work and will not be renewing her engagement with WorldVenture after the 2023 tax year. Please note that Lois has confirmed that she will finish filing any 2023 returns that were extended and will assist workers with tax notices that they receive for the 2023 tax year.
We are so thankful for the services that Lois has provided to our workers and WorldVenture over the years and we will miss her greatly – she and her husband Mark have been true ministry partners with us in this very important area. We pray that God blesses her and her family in the next season of their lives. If Lois has helped prepare your tax returns and you have enjoyed working with them, please feel free to send her a note to let her and Mark know your appreciation. She can be reached via email at lois@hustonaccountingservices.
WorldVenture Finance is actively looking for a qualified CPA or tax preparer with working experience with the ministerial classification and self-employment taxes, foreign earned income exclusion, multi-state filings, and foreign bank account reporting. Should you know of any CPA’s or tax preparers (they do not need to be local to Colorado) that you feel would be able to contract with WorldVenture to prepare approximately 200 individual tax returns, please send an email to financehelp@worldventure.com, keyword “Taxes”.
This (often panicked) complaint—or something like it—is one of the more frequent that we receive from Global Workers, especially at this time of year. We understand your panic. However, if you ever think your USF statement is incorrect, be reassured: it may well be wrong but that this is probably normal, and temporary!
There are three circumstances under which your USF balances can be temporarily incorrect for a good reason. Our accounting software works in such a way that whenever we have more than one accounting period open at a time, statement balances are temporarily unreliable. They might be correct, but they might be off—even way off! And there are multiple instances during which we legitimately must have more than one accounting period open at a time. Here they are:
Please keep all this in mind as you check your USF statement or balance. If it’s the first day of the month, or a Friday during the third quarter of the year, or the first 10 days of January or July, expect that your USF balance may be wrong for a short period of time. Check back after the applicable time period is over and all should be well. If not, definitely let us know at FinanceHelp@worldventure.com.
I know, sometimes it feels like we have as many acronyms as the US government!
QWFR is shorthand for Quarterly Work Funds Report. Now before you quit reading, thinking you don’t need this information because you’re not receiving Work Funds, that’s precisely the confusion we want to address. Please read on far enough make sure you really don’t need to do quarterly reports. There has been some confusion regarding the exact circumstances under which quarterly reports are required.
First, let’s establish why these reports are necessary in the first place. That will help us understand the rationale behind when they’re required and when they’re not. The IRS requires that WorldVenture knows where all donated funds are, and to account for how they are spent. In the case of an expense reimbursement request, the expense report and accompanying receipts (as needed) constitute that accounting. ’Nuf done!
In the case of work-related funds that have been advanced to a worker, the accounting must take place and be submitted after the expenditure(s). And here’s the critical part that many have missed: If any advanced funds remain unspent, those funds must either be returned to the employer in a timely manner, or the worker must continue to report on them until they have been spent or returned.
How does this apply to our specific context? What it means is that you are required to submit Quarterly Work Funds Reports for as long as any of the following are true:
It’s this last criteria that has tripped up a few workers. The tendency is to think that if you did not receive any Work Funds during the previous quarter, there’s nothing to report on. Or another fallacy is thinking that because you had no work-related expenses during the previous quarter, there’s nothing to report on. The truth is that as long as you have any unspent advanced ministry funds under your control, you must submit a Quarterly Work Funds Report, even if only to report the amount of the balance that you possess, whether or not that balance has changed since your last report. As long as you have a balance of ministry funds in your possession, you must continue to submit QWFR’s each and every quarter.
We hope this clears up the confusion, and thanks for listening. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask them via FinanceHelp@worldventure.com (using the key word “Work Funds” or “Quarterly Work Funds Report”).
For at least two years, you’ve been hearing rumors—okay, more than rumors; it’s been in previous Finance newsletters—about the development of a uniform banking standards policy. We haven’t made as much progress on this project as we would like, but we wanted to remind you that it is still very much in process because it will have such far-reaching implications for the entire organization. Not only will there be a new policy, but some new procedures and new expectations for us all. Most fields will have to adjust to at least a few new practices. This is all part of the bigger picture in which our auditors are requesting that we consolidate our financial reporting, field and HQ.
You may be thinking, “Wait, everything is working fine on my field. Why do we need a new policy?” First, be assured that this is not an attempt by HQ to gain control over field monies for the purpose of appropriating those funds for corporate use! Not at all, but there are three big reasons a new banking policy is needed:
All bank account information needs to be available to those in the organization who must answer to our auditors and to the IRS. Not having central access to this information is dangerous for the organization. And it is irresponsible for an organization to maintain assets that it cannot track or account for in its audit reports.
As just one example, consider the hypothetical scenario where a smaller field neglects to update the signatories on its local bank account over several years, and then the one remaining signatory on that field suddenly leaves the mission or dies. This could result in those funds being permanently inaccessible, jeopardizing kingdom work in the field.
We want to reiterate that this is not an attempt to gain “line-of-sight” to field funds for purposes of repatriating money back to the U.S. for other purposes. There are no plans to change our ethos of a field-driven approach to contextualizing our gospel impact. But if you have any questions about this matter, don’t hesitate to contact us at financehelp@worldventure.com.
We hope to be able to provide more information about the actual policy and its implications next quarter. This information will include more specifics about what field leadership and global workers in general will need to do to begin complying with this new policy.
Information contained in this newsletter is intended for internal use by WorldVenture workers, staff, approved volunteers, and board members. Unauthorized distribution to other parties is not permitted without permission from Finance leadership.