CONFIRMEDthe charities’ own tax returns
Here is the whole thing in plain words. Three Utah charities are run by the same handful of people. They asked the public for money to help poor children and to support “wellness.” Then, by their own tax filings, one of them handed $277,664 to about thirty-one college football players and called it tuition.
Four people. The man who signs the main charity’s returns, Mark Comer, was banned for life by the Federal Trade Commission from selling internet businesses years ago, after a company he co-founded paid a four-million-dollar fine; this year he took over the same asset-protection company, Legally Mine, that the rest of this site is about, the one built by the family in the franchise fight. A husband and wife, Lon and Carrie Henderson, sign the other two charities; Lon owns a for-profit wellness business, and one of the charities says its whole reason to exist is to promote that business’s brand. A fourth person, Min Kim, co-owns a for-profit company with them, out of the same office the charities use. Same people, same suite, three charities that are supposed to be separate.
The first charity said it gave a hundred and twenty thousand dollars to the second charity to build “educational and mentoring courses” for “500+” people. The second charity’s own return shows what really happened: no courses, and nowhere near five hundred people. Just thirty-three payments, every one marked “TUITION,” to about thirty-one names, and almost all of them are BYU football players. That same return then says the money went to “various local non-profit organizations.” It did not. It went to individuals. The return argues with itself on the same page.
If these were real tuition bills, they would match what BYU actually charges. They don’t. Every single payment lands on a clean grid of round numbers, a couple of dollars off a multiple of two hundred and fifty, and the whole thing adds up to exactly 1,111 times $250. Walk-ons and scholarship players got the same amounts. Real tuition does not look like that. Made-up awards do.
Most of these players are walk-ons, the ones a university does not cover at all. A charity paying their tuition is just paying them to play. And it was not even new: a couple of years earlier a snack-bar company, Built Bar, was paying walk-ons’ tuition right out in the open, as advertising. The only thing that changed was running it through a charity, so that a booster payment could turn into a tax write-off. One of the people who helped start that snack-bar company later started another company that shows up as a sponsor of the very group that ran the money through the charity, the same man in the room both times. And two of the very same players the snack-bar company paid openly back then show up again on the charity’s list three years later. Same school, same benefit, some of the same players; the only thing that changed is what the money was called on a tax form.
The third charity is the clearest. Its own website told donors they were “donating to a 501(c)(3)” and would “not get anything in return but the feel-good feeling,” while also promising that “87-95% of the funds raised will go to athletes”. On its launch day, BYU’s own athletic director called it “a corporate sponsor of BYU Athletics.” A corporate sponsor that pays the roster is not a charity, and they said it themselves. The math agrees: only about sixteen cents of every dollar came from the general public, which fails the test a real public charity has to pass. The tax agency first called it a private foundation; the group said that was a mistake and asked to be treated as a public charity, and then its own numbers failed the public test anyway. Even the donor list is not what it looks like: one of the listed donors also sits on the group’s own board, running its women’s volleyball push, which the group itself said was about seven hundred thousand dollars. And the football players are only part of it: the same group’s third charity paid a couple hundred thousand dollars more to dozens of other athletes across sports that year. Put together, close to half a million dollars, to about a hundred college athletes, in a single year.
The money was raised at a golf tournament that was sold to sponsors as a children’s cause. The sponsorship form is headed “HERE’S HOW YOUR SPONSORSHIP GOES DIRECTLY TO HELP CHILDREN” and it literally prices the tiers in kids: “$12,500 = 290 Kids/Yr” on down. Sponsors bought children and wrote it off, in the same years the money was flowing to a football roster. Two of the banners hanging at that tournament, in the charity’s own photographs, were the founder’s multi-level-marketing company and Legally Mine. And that sales company was more than a bystander passing the hat: the man who ran it as president was a business partner of the charity’s founder, in a shared investment company, together with the money manager who now helps run the company that took over Legally Mine. The company raising the money, the man it was raised for, and the people who took over the asset-protection brand, all partners.
The biggest year is the one you cannot see. The charity’s own numbers show it raised and spent well over a million dollars in a single earlier year, but there is no public tax return for that year at all. One donor fund, on its own filing, wrote that it sent $300,000 that year marked “BYU STUDENT ATHLETE EDUCATION” to a charity the government lists as a mental-health group. And most of the money coming in cannot be traced at all, because it came through big Wall Street donor funds that keep the giver’s name secret. One of the few names you can see is the family foundation behind the Utah Jazz, which sent fifty thousand dollars to the athlete charity.
On the money side, it is not a close call. A charity that spends its money on things that are not charity loses its tax-exempt status; the insiders who benefited can be made to pay it back; and the taxes that should have been withheld from what were really wages come due, with a penalty that can land on the people who ran the money personally. None of that depends on proving anyone meant to do it. The criminal side is harder, because it turns on whether the false statements on the tax form were put there on purpose, and that is the one thing still open. These were not kitchen-table forms, either; big professional accounting firms prepared them, and nobody says the accountants did anything wrong. But that narrows it: the false words came from one of exactly two places, the officer who signed the form or the professional who typed it from what the officer provided, and that question has an answer. Four separate legal experts, shown these facts with no names attached, from tough to cautious, all agreed on two things: the money side is close to certain, and the whole criminal question comes down to that single fact. Where it gets decided is the tax authorities, but the trouble is already sitting on the public forms, and it is real. And the tax side is not the only side: the people who gave were told their money helped children, and some wrote it off on their taxes, so fooling them to raise the money is its own kind of fraud, one that does not stop at the tax agency.
All of this money is heading to one place. The tuition ends up at BYU, and the group that pays the players is, in the athletic director’s own words, a “corporate sponsor” of BYU Athletics. And BYU is not an ordinary charity that has to answer for itself. It does not file a public tax return at all, because in the eyes of the tax law it is an arm of the Church that runs it, paid for mostly by tithing and led by Church leaders. So the one end of this that would show what the school got, and on what terms, is hidden behind the same wall as the Church’s money, a wall it never has to open. This is not saying the school or the Church ran the scheme; there is no sign of that. It is saying that the place all of this money lands is the one part of the story nobody on the outside can check, and that is not the same as clean. And one of the four is BYU’s own official supplement supplier, selling to the school on one side while co-owning the players’ for-profit outfit on the other.
Paying college athletes is legal now. The problem here is not the paying; it is calling it a children’s charity and swearing to things on tax forms that the same forms disprove. Nobody named here has been charged with anything, and everyone is presumed innocent, and not everyone in the group is equally exposed. The two business partners named alongside the founder have no role in any of the charities, and the donor who sits on the board is named only because both facts are on the group’s own public lists. The players are the people who got paid, not the people who filled out the forms, so they are not the story. One of the charities in these filings, a real relief group working in Africa, is exactly what it says it is. The false statements are on the foundations’ own forms, signed by their own people; the school did not fill them out, and there is no sign the school or the Church ran the scheme. That is as far as it goes, and no further, in either direction.
The BAM Map is independent reporting on matters of public concern. Nothing here is a finding of any person’s guilt; the criminal charges referenced are unadjudicated and every defendant is presumed innocent. Sources are linked so readers can check the record. · Home · Map · The law · Bodycam