OSCR consultation

Howard Lake | 20 October 2014 | Blogs

OSCR (Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator) has a consultation in process – Targeted Regulation of Scottish Charities. It is consulting on proposals for:
(i) changes to annual reporting by charities to the Scottish Charity Regulator
(ii) charity accounts to be published on the Scottish Charity Register
(iii) the creation of a database of charity trustees of Scottish charities
(iv) the introduction of a requirement for Scottish charities to report serious incidents to the Scottish Charity Regulator
Despite the legal requirement for charities to provide their annual report and accounts on request, OSCR still receives requests for this information and therefore intends to start publishing charity accounts on the Scottish Charity Register. Do you want to make sure that this happens?
Another planned change is the development of a trustee database. Analysis estimates that there are approximately 180,630 charity trustees in Scotland. OSCR currently only regularly collects and stores information for one Principal Contact for each charity. Even this is not always made available on the website, at the moment. The plan is initially to establish a database for internal use only, accessible by OSCR staff in the course of their duties. However, OSCR may ultimately publish the names (but not addresses or other details) of each charity’s trustees on its entry on the Scottish Charity Register (as is currently done in England and Wales). OSCR believes this would be a valuable public resource and further increase charities’ public accountability and transparency. What do you think?
The consultation ends on 24 October 2014.
 
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.