Apr 30, 2013 — USA (SUN) — Every year we see a tiny list of Resolutions released by the "ISKCON GBC Society of West Bengal" which are the culmination of the annual GBC meetings and are meant for the governance of ISKCON throughout the world. What is released is only a fraction of what is actually discussed in these meetings. It appears they feel the general body of devotees are not intelligent enough or qualified to hear and understand the majority of what they discuss, so most material goes unpublished.
We should remind the readers that this West Bengal society was only registered in 1993, and has no connection to Srila Prabhupada's original GBC, which was a non-incorporated entity meant for providing moral and spiritual guidance to ISKCON temples. Further this West Bengal registered society has no legal control over ISKCON centers or devotees in the world. Devotees only follow it because they don't know they have no obligation to take it seriously.
What is disturbing about the yearly GBC Resolutions, besides the fact that they don't make any of the Resolutions public, is the yearly account expenditure for this newly created "ISKCON GBC Society of West Bengal". This year they have spent 5,233,538 Rs., or roughly $100,000 US Dollars for their GBC society work. When Srila Prabhupada formed the GBC, there was no expenditure. They didn't require $100,000 a year to have their meetings and discuss the management of ISKCON. Everyone just needed to show up and engage in the discussions to come to a conclusion on various matters. Where does the expense come into it?
Each GBC member is required to pay their own travel to attend these meetings. Why should there be $100,000 US Dollars of expenses each year for this newly created society, when there were no such expenses in Srila Prabhupada's time?
Let us look at some of the categories of expenses they list:
Dandavats Website - $5,165.
How can they justify such an expense? An honest estimate of actual expenses to host their website would be between $10 and $20 a month ($20 being quite generous an estimate). Even taking the higher estimation, that would only come to $240 a year in hosting fees.
Dandavats is hosted at dreamhost.com, which charges $8.95 a month for unlimited web hosting. So that would only come to $108 a year. Where does the GBC get this ridiculous amount of $5,165 a year to run dandavats.com? What I can assume is they have created an artificial paid salary post, which is completely unnecessary, so that someone can live off of this at the expense of ISKCON, for basically doing nothing. Just a way to siphon money off from ISKCON and live an easy life.
GBC EC Secretariat - $5,888.
What exactly is this and what are their expenses? There is another category for GBC Mayapur Office with expenses of $3,435. None of these things existed in Srila Prabhupada's time and there were no such expenses.
GBC Community Relations Office - $2,944.
Another peculiar department they have created. What exactly is a community relations office and how is it separate from the GBC Mayapur office or the GBC EC Secretariat? They create all these separate departments with separate expenses which really appear to have no function. In my view they are all simply paid positions they are handing out to various people for no particular reason.
GBC Corresponding Secretary - $5,888.
Here we have another big expense for a corresponding secretary, which is somehow separate from the expenses of the GBC Secretariat, the GBC Mayapur office and the GBC Community Relations office (who all have their separate expense accounts). Who are all these people, and why are they getting paid to do basically nothing at all? Prabhupada never established such departments with paid staff for the GBC. Prabhupada never had a GBC budget, spending huge amounts of money each year for basically... what? What does the GBC actually do? Nothing when it comes down to it. The temples are running separately, paying their own expenses. What is the GBC's roll that requires such huge expenditure? They are simply meant to meet and discuss, and then to encourage the temples within their zones.
GBC Strategic Planning Team - $10,331.
This is the largest expense each year, paying some consultants to advise them on how the GBC should be structured. Srila Prabhupada has already given the structure and instructed how it should be set up. But instead of following Srila Prabhupada's instructions they want to hire outside consultants to teach the GBC how they should run things. The problem they have is they do not want to give up their pampered positions as GBC members, and at the same time they need to be able to pay off the obedient followers under them to keep the system intact. The result is they create a huge tree of fabricated positions and titles, from GBC member, to GBC minister, to GBC assistant, to GBC special assignment member, to GBC acting member, to GBC full member, to GBC retired member, and the list goes on and on. They are creating a hierarchy of meaningless positions to reward those who obediently follow them, without having to dilute their own position as full GBC member. Why hasn't the membership of the GBC ever changed in the last 20 years? They keep adding underlings to the meetings with various lower rank titles, keeping the core GBC members intact as the sole supreme leaders. This is their strategic planning, which costs a lot of money as the yearly budget shows.
ISKCON News - $3,098.
Another website with a ridiculously unjustified budget. It should cost around $100 to host this site per year.
ISKCON Resolve - $8,264.
Another GBC department with someone making money for no reason.
ISKCON Database - $2,840.
Are you in the ISKCON database? Who knows? But it costs around $3,000 a year to maintain it. What exactly it does no one knows, but it's a yearly feature in the GBC budget. Who has access to this database? Is it only GBC members, or is it only the GBC Chairman? Who exactly has access to this database and what is it for?
GBC Emergency Fund $3,925.
This is a yearly sum that just gets labeled as emergency expenditure. What it was for and what the emergency was will always remain unknown and confidential. But trust us, there was an emergency need to spend money and we spent it.
GBC Annual General Meeting - $6,870.
Here is the actual expense of the month-long meetings held each year in Mayapur. In Srila Prabhupada's time what was the expense? Devotees stayed in the temple, ate the temple prasadam, met together to discuss, and went home. Where is the question of such a huge expense? We are talking about 30 or 40 people staying for a month in India, where costs are much cheaper than in the west. What does it really cost to feed 30 or 40 people? The rooms are already owned by ISKCON so there is no expense to provide them rooms. But somehow they spend 371,000 Rs. to hold a meeting for a couple weeks in Mayapur, where they already own the rooms and buildings used for the event. What expenses can there be? In Srila Prabhupada's time he would never have allowed the devotees to waste such amounts of money just to sit and discuss.
Deity Worship Ministry - $8,264.
The Deity Worship ministry needs to spend 446,260 Rs. a year, not to worship Deities... That's already paid for by all the temples independently. What do they spend this huge amount of money on? Discussing to worship Deities? Who knows. But I have not seen anything substantial to justify huge expenditures by a GBC ministry each year. They used to print a magazine of some sort, the last one I saw was maybe a decade ago. I don't know if it still exists. Regardless, there are only a few hundred ISKCON temples in the world, and even if they were printing books and sending them free to every ISKCON temple (which I don't think they are doing), you couldn't spend this amount of money.
Total GBC annual expenses: around $100,000 US Dollars.
All of these ministries and expenses appear to be the misuse of ISKCON money by providing paid salaried positions to friends. Every year the GBC is spending $100,000 USD to basically do nothing at all. For that amount of money you could build a temple in India each year, or you could open a temple in a new city in America each and every year. In many places in America you can buy a nice house for $50,000 to $100,000. They could be using this money to open a new ISKCON temple each year in a new location and expand the preaching. Instead they are just siphoning off the money slowly for their cronies and their family maintenance under the excuses of various ministries and GBC departments.
A few other things to think about. This newly formed ISKCON GBC Society of West Bengal is registered in India and must use its money for activities within India, by government regulation. The Indian government does not allow Indian societies to carry out activities overseas and send funds overseas for activities outside of India. Clearly the $100,000 budget they list did not all get spent in India for activities within India. So the question is, how have they altered their accounts to fool the Indian government that the expenses were all for activities within India? If they will engage in fraudulent accounting on this basic level, then what trust can we have in what they report?
The next question is, where does the money come from? How is the money received and which bank account is the money deposited into before being spent? The entire process should be transparent. Do the individual GBC members donate the money to the GBC society from their personal money (where would that come from?), or do ISKCON temples in their zone have to donate money to this society to pay the expenses?
What are the exact mechanics of the transference of money to this society? Do they have clearance from the Indian government to receive these foreign remittances from foreign donors, or is it done through illegal money laundering to make it appear as though the money was donated within India by Indians?
All of these questions naturally arise when things are not transparent. As such, the GBC should release their detailed and specific accounts for every single expense incurred in the year by each department, along with release of the names of donors who have provided the money to this ISKCON GBC Society of West Bengal. Further, the names of people who authorize each expense in each department should be made public so we know who is using this money and in what manner. The devotees of ISKCON should also be shown the bank statements of this society along with yearly account balances so that we can know what is going on with ISKCON's money.
Further, the registration documents of this newly created society should be made public so that we can see who is allowed to be a member of the society and by what process (as established in the registration document). The names of each regular member should be provided and the names of the founders and acting directors of this society should be released along with their respective nationalities, This is all required so that the devotees of ISKCON can know who is this society that claims to govern us, the members of ISKCON.
This is not Srila Prabhupada's ISKCON GBC. This is a recently registered society of West Bengal, which has come forward to claim absolute authority over Srila Prabhupada's ISKCON society throughout the world. As such the members of ISKCON have a right to know who it is who is making this claim over them.
