I often get asked questions from my friends and contacts about the Amish, and one of them is “do Amish pay taxes?” Yes, they do, but they are exempt from social security. If you’re more interested about it, read this.

On a different note, the Amish evidently also have their own “taxes” within their church district. Read on…

Each of the church districts in Somerset County has two trustees. They took care of all the donations when ever there was a hospital bill or another need in the community as well as taking care of the church and school expenses.

Every five years they took a month to visit every family to go over all their financial information to decide how much you had to pay in church taxes.  LV and I detested that meeting more than anything else. The bishop used to announce in church when they were planning to make their rounds and encouraged everyone to stay at home so that you would be available when they stopped in.

The head trustee in our district was a short pompous guy with a long scraggly beard. He strutted with an air of utmost importance at the job he had to do being in charge of everyone including the bishop.

The time had arrived that they were making their rounds again and we knew our turn to be interrogated would soon be here. I was only a few weeks away from having our baby and was in no mood to be stuck in the house with those men. LV made plans to take Sailor and me over to spend the day with my parents as soon as they arrived.

According to our plan LV gave me a ride to my parents and then hurried home to get the unpleasant deal with the trustees over. They had brought all their papers in their satchels and proceeded to need to know exactly how much money we had in the bank and in our pocketbook, how much debt we had and what we owned. The list of things they had that needed to be answered was ridiculous, it seemed the only thing they forgot to ask was how many rolls of toilet paper we had on hand.

So evidently Amish don’t exactly practice “free-will offerings.” You can read the whole post here.