Lionhearted new effort

Finance | 1 Feb 2006

LionHeart, the occupational benevolent fund for members of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), has developed a new system for scanning all gift aid certificates. The move came after HMRC randomly selected LionHeart for a routine gift aid audit, for which it needed to be able to retrieve instantly any individual gift aid certificate it had ever received. Gift aid was first launched within LionHeart at the beginning of 2002, since when it has amassed over 20,000 gift aid certificates many of them covering backdated donations to the beginning of the gift aid scheme in 2000.

Under the new procedure, each gift aid certificate is scanned off-site by Quantor Scanning Limited and returned to LionHeart on CD for automatic integration into the donor’s record in Blackbaud’s Raisers Edge system. The original documentation can then be destroyed.

Despite sounding long-winded and expensive, Roger Chester, head of finance and administration at LionHeart, argues that compared with the cost of storing original paper documents and the possible penalties that HMRC could levy against the charity, the system is well worth it. ‘If we cannot provide full traceability of gift aid certification, HMRC could claim back the full value of all unverifiable tax relief claimed plus interest. Potentially this is a very considerable sum so I view this project as an invaluable investment against potential loss of gift aid income.’

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