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The Charity Commission gets tough. Or does it?

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Adam Rothwell - Wednesday, September 10, 2008

A watchdog The big news in charity-town this week comes from the Charity Commission. Its enforcement division has just published a review of charitable wrongdoing over the past year – and it’s come up with some interesting results.

Most intriguingly, the Commission takes charities to task for producing bad accounts and poor-quality annual reports. And so it should: lots of charities truly are very bad at these things.

Perplexingly, however, the Commission doesn’t have a strategy for putting this situation right. Of course, it dishes out advice to charities which want to improve their work. That’s useful. But bad charities will not read those recommendations. Those who most need the Commission’s advice will not hear it.

This is a tragedy. The Commission is a genuine fount of wisdom: its advice booklets and research studies are both useful and easy to understand. Our very own charity-ranking criteria are derived in large part from one of the Commission’s publications.

And, when things go seriously wrong in a charity – for instance when trustees commit fraud, or when vulnerable people are put at risk – the Commission often takes swift action.

But where charities make smaller mistakes – when, for example, they fail to write a decent annual report or submit confusing accounts – it rarely, if ever, does anything. Charities are left to their own, inadequate devices.

I find this unbelievably annoying, and all the more so because it embodies the Commission’s overall approach to regulation. To take another example, the Commission puts an extraordinary amount of effort into drawing up charity accounting rules. The resulting regulations are clear and comprehensive. But many charities don't bother observing them. The Commission’s response to this rule-breaking? To ignore it.

Such behaviour is not entirely the Commission’s fault. New legislation means it has to do more work with less money. But it also means that charities which merely perform poorly – rather than flagrantly breaching the law – are not being properly regulated.
 

 


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Charities and fundraisers
Submitted by Cindy M (not verified) on Thu, 11/09/2008 - 1:16am.

I think a lot of people already know that some charities don't manage donations well. That's why when I want to give to a charity (I like PETA :D) I use my search toolbar I got from give2network.com. They don't take donations but just let you search and then they use Yahoo!'s advertiser profits to give to the charity you pick. It's pretty decent because at least you know you're not giving money to some charity that you don't know how they're going to spend their funds--you just search and shop online with the toolbar and the money goes to the charity you pick. I think things like that are going to be the wave of the future with all the misuse of funds going on.

Didn't they pass or try to pass some other law more recently that was going to make it harder for charities to use their funds effectively?


Oh they are worse than that
Submitted by David Abse (not verified) on Wed, 10/09/2008 - 8:58pm.

The Charity Commission have needed reforming for years, they are ineffective in terms of supporting development, and even worse in terms of policing the sector. A fine example is a large international charity (based out of Brazil) that was subject to a Charity Commission investigation a few years ago, that was linked in the press to a well known child abuse/death case a few years ago, and was investigated primarily because of spurious claims the charity was accused of making, including, amongst others, the claim that they had the power, through miracles, to cure cancer. It is actually illegal to claim such a thing, and the charity commission would have struck them off the charity register had they not found the charity innocent of doing such a thing. Jolly good eh? Except, a simple look on the charity's website would have shown a few days after the judgement that they were still making these claims. You will be relieved to know (I think someone might have pointed out the little problem this might cause them) that the charity no longer claims to cure cancer, just TB, and offers a magic handkerchief to cure all your other debts.

The leader of this organisation is a multi-millionaire (richer every day from donations) living in Columbia, I believe.

Meanwhile the charity commission worries about presentation of annual reports.


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