I should properly have called it a settlement rather than a fine, but anyway:
The issue for me here is the willfulness and scale of the deception. I'm not so surprised to discover that the Church has a ~$37 billion portfolio; I'm not sufficiently interested to pay close attention to them, but but it was apparent to any but the mot casual observer that the Church was a very wealthy entity. As a religious organization, it's benefits from tax exemption; it seems to me that part of the price for that special treatment is greater transparency - notwithstanding that this isn't a tax liability case.
BTW I'm referring to 'the Church' throughout as Ensign Peak is a wholly owned entity of the Church and no management fees change hands. Further, Ensign Peak wasn't authorized to file 13Fs on its own initiative (per the order); it effectively has zero independence of its parent. I'm not sure why they set it up so that Ensign Peak pays $4m to the SEC and the Church itself $1m, but I'm going to guess because it looks better that way in press coverage and on their next form 990 filing.
What I mean about willfulness and scale is that from the outset, these shell companies were created to conceal the fact of the Church's portfolio from the public, other investors, and to a large extent their own membership. As detailed in the order, this concealment stretched over nearly 2 decades and eventually grew to encompass 13 shell companies, with new ones being set up when managers determined that business intelligence/the press were becoming aware of the arrangements. Indeed, when a public website figured out the network of reporting entities and made the facts public in 2018, 2 of the business managers of the shell companies (who were based in Salt Lake City, though the entities were registered in Delaware) resigned, expressing concern about what they had been asked to do. Rather than the network of shell companies being shut down, the troubled managers were just replaced, and the arrangement continued until the SEC got involved.
All told, this involved about 100 different acts of deception (in terms of the misleading 13f filings; I have no idea how many private or public statements might have ensued). So the settlement here works out at about $50,000 per false filing. I doubt that that did much more than cover the SEC's legal and administrative costs on the investigation and preparation for trial. The number and long timescale of the deceptions in my view demonstrates impunity; this wasn't a single negligent or reckless decision, but a long-running practice that only unravelled because third party observers connected the dots independently.
You wrote elsewhere in the thread about how we don't arrest a Ferrari driver who makes a right turn at a red light just to deter other rich assholes, while also commenting that if you serially break the traffic laws, eventually your license will get suspended. Well, they serially broke the reporting laws, and every time outside observers or some of their own staff called foul, they escalated rather than abandoned their deceptive practices.
It seems, by the way, that this might be the tip of a larger iceberg. Two former Ensign Peak managers (who may be the ones who resigned previously) have alleged that the Church has around $100 billion in assets and and has violated its nonprofit status by not distributing any of it, but instead holding it in reserve for the 'second coming of Christ'. The link below includes a recent filing with the US Senate Finance Committee.
https://religionunplugged.com/news/2023/2/8/former-employee-...