Active and former church members who tithed to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and later sued the faith for alleged fraud failed to file their class-action lawsuit on time, an appeals court has ruled.

The unanimous decision Monday by a three-judge panel of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals confirms a 2025 decree by U.S. District Court Judge Robert Shelby, who tossed out the fraud case.

The ruling effectively closes the door on future lawsuits built around a whistleblower’s late 2019 explosive allegations that the Utah-based global faith hid and hoarded billons of dollars of donations for years, without spending any on charity.

Media reports of whistleblower David Nielsen’s revelations to the IRS about the church’s multibillion-dollar investments built from tithing had spread far and wide by February 2020 — and the plaintiffs should have taken notice, the appellate judges found.

Nielsen’s accusations exposed, among other things, that the church’s investment arm had spent $1.4 billion on the development of City Creek Center — despite high-profile assertions by church leaders that no tithing funds would be used on the downtown Salt Lake City mall.

In an April 2003 General Conference address, then-church President Gordon B. Hinckley insisted that tithing funds “have not and will not be used” for the shopping center, stating that the money came from “commercial entities owned by the church” and the “earnings of invested reserve funds.”

The appellate judges cited news coverage of the whistleblower’s allegations filed with tax regulators appearing in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Forbes, Fox News, CNN and Utah outlets such as The Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret News.

But rather than suing sooner, the plaintiffs did not begin to file their federal claims of fraud and unjust enrichment against church leaders and investment firm Ensign Peak Advisors until October 2023, the ruling said, well outside a three-year statute of limitations window specified in Utah law.

“The issue is not whether plaintiffs saw or should have seen any particular article,” 10th Circuit Judge Harris L. Hartz wrote in Monday’s unanimous opinion.

“Rather,” Hartz wrote, with Judges Gregory A. Phillips and Nancy Moritz, “the national scope and quantity of sources illustrate that the whistleblower report was widely known and very likely appeared in multiple other news sources and in public conversation in general.”

As members of the public interested in the issue, Hartz wrote, the plaintiffs should have caught wind of the basis for the fraud claims in a more timely fashion.

The 23-page opinion also makes note of three other sets of plaintiffs who did file federal claims based on the whistleblower’s report well within same the statute of limitations, including wealthy Utahn James Huntsman, brother of former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who filed a lawsuit in March 2021, seeking his own tithing back.

Huntsman’s lawsuit and two other cases have since been dismissed on unrelated legal grounds, including the legal precedent of church autonomy under the First Amendment, which bars legal probing of religious matters.

Plaintiffs in the proposed class action had argued they did not realize the full basis of their fraud allegations until after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission fined the church and Ensign Peak in February 2023, and “60 Minutes” aired a segment on church finances in May 2023.

The SEC’s order and resulting settlement fined the church $1 million and Ensign Peak $4 million, accusing them of using shell companies to obscure the breadth and depth of a multibillion-dollar investment portfolio.

Monday’s ruling shuts down a series of fraud suits filed by former Latter-day Saints in Utah, Illinois, Washington, Tennessee and California that all hinged on Nielsen’s allegations and were eventually combined into one case and sent to federal court in the Beehive State.

The plaintiffs asserted that the church and its investment managers had breached their fiduciary duty by misusing the donations and failing to disclose it; fraudulently induced them to tithe; and misrepresented that tithing funds would be used only for church purposes.

In April 2025, Shelby dismissed their complaint with prejudice, meaning it couldn’t be refiled. The federal judge found legal flaws with regard to each of those allegations as well as saying it was barred under the three-year statute of limitations.

The three-judge panel agreed this week with Shelby, finding that the lone issue of the legal time clock was enough to toss the entire consolidated case out of court without examining other accusations.

Nielsen has urged a U.S. Senate committee to investigate the church’s financial practices. But so far, there has been little public indication that major investigations are underway from Congress or the IRS.