The Charity Commission wants to know what you think about online accounts

Howard Lake | 29 July 2009 | Blogs

• Tagged with:
• Charity Commission
• funding
• Major gift
• Prospect research

Last week’s Third Sector magazine mentioned the relaunch of the online charity community section of the website of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales (ICAEW). Phew! Well, how could I resist?

www.ion.icaew.com/charity seems to be designed mainly for accountants, and the like, but I couldn’t resist a rummage. In The Forum, I found an article “Charity Commission seeks your help”. The Charity Commission is undertaking work to update its website, aiming to improve the contents and the navigability of the site. To that end, it is asking people to complete a short survey. The Charity Commission wants to know what users think about Charity accounts – are they “complete, appropriate and useful”?

While I think that the CC website is a marvellous resource, I would like Charity accounts to always include a list of recipients of grants. I also think that the Charity Commission should be careful to make sure that the accounts are not in fact blank pages, and are for the correct charity.

When a trust gives a grant to an organisation where a trustee has an interest, that is supposed to be declared in the accounts. I recently found a case where that appeared not to have been declared. If this had been confirmed, I could have identified the trustee from his corporate interests – handy for a researcher. The Charity Commission employee didn’t appear to take my enquiry seriously, so I was unable to confirm the connection between the two organisations. Was the Charity in breach of Charity Commission rules?

I also think that when you complete the feedback form on the Charity Commission website, it would be useful if their automated reply included your initial enquiry. It would make it so much easier to keep tabs on their efficiency!

Janet Slade at the Charity Commission told me that they want to make the accountancy pages more accessible to all, so the more replies they get from non accountants the more likely they are to be able to do this.

The survey needs to completed and returned by 21st September 2009. You can get a copy of it from Ja*********@ch***************.uk. You can download a copy of the questionnaire below.

Meanwhile, I’ll take another rummage through the ICAEW website later on.

Finbar Cullen
ResearchPlus

About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale. He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.