All sorts of suspected deception going on surrounding the cutbacks and the reasons for them. But hard to pin down a direct falsehood. Sure, they initially said they were reducing the magazines so the brothers had less to read, then later said it was to save money. But I suppose they could say it was both, and just about get away with it.
However I think there is a more fundamental example of two different statements that can't easily be reconciled.
In the May broadcast (from about 17 minutes) Stephen Lett made the statement that the reason for a projected deficit next year was that the financial needs have accelerated unlike at any time in the recent past. And the reason for acceleration was that they planned to build 3000 Kingdom Halls every year going forward instead of 2000 as in the last few years.
Yet a few months later they announced that building work would be scaled back rather than accelerated.
If the first statement was true, that the projected deficit was a result of the projected increased in construction, then the later halt in construction should logically prevent the deficit.
Yet Herd made two announcements of further cutbacks on bethelite numbers and printing on top of construction.
Conclusion: this would seem to imply that Lett was not being entirely truthful in May when he claimed that the projected deficit was a result of planned increases in construction. The fact that the cutbacks go much further than simply reducing the amount of construction planned shows that the deficit is larger than he intimated at that time and caused by day to day running rather than future expansion of Kingdom Hall construction.