Charity Commission hunts out dormant charity bank accounts
Howard Lake | 10 October 2002 | News
The Commission has started a project to trace and identify charity funds in dormant bank and building society accounts, using their powers in section 28 of the Charities Act 1993.
The Commission is working with financial institutions and aims to identify any unused charitable resources which can be recovered and reapplied for other charitable purposes. It explains that this task is in line with its statutory duty of promoting the effective use of charitable resources.
Section 28 of the Charities Act 1993 encourages banks, building societies, deposit-takers, etc. voluntarily to inform the Charity Commission of dormant accounts without breaching client confidentiality. Once informed, the Commission, after making “reasonable (but unsuccessful) enquiries to locate any of the charity trustees”, can find “proper outlets for applying the money (which would otherwise continue to remain in a dormant account achieving no effective benefit) towards charitable purposes.”
Advertisement
If it finds any such dormant accounts, it reserves the right to transfer the funds to other charities with similar objects for application towards charitable activities.
So far it appears the Commission has found only one account which it proposes to transfer, namely that of the North Tees Scanner Appeal.
Related posts
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.