I HAD ALWAYS THOUGHT that American charities had it easy. There's no US equivalent of the Charity Commission, and, judging by the remarkable list of badly behaved American outfits listed on the (sadly now defunct) Trent Stamp's Take blog, I assumed that they could get away with more-or-less anything.

But I was wrong. According to an article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, a worthy American news outlet, Uncle Sam's taxman has been policing the 1.4m American charities with renewed vigour - and its first victim has been a charity which spent too little doing charitable work.

I was shocked by this. I tend to get quite uppity when I read that charities are spending 'too much' on overheads, because in most cases such overheads can be justified. But in this case, the charity appeared to spend less than one per cent of its resources on actual charitable work - which seemed pretty wrong, even to me. Three cheers for the taxman, and all that.

A 'charity' behaving like this in Britain should also be in for a hard time from the regulators. But with the Charity Commission suffering from a woefully stretched budget, it's my suspicion that such murky outfits still exist in this country. How to fix this? We should complain to the Commission about bad charities. Like in America, something good may well come of it.

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