The Accounting Standards Board has written to the Charity Commission about the way that Citizens Advice treats its pension deficit in its accounts.

The ASB’s chair, Roger Marshall, penned the letter on 20 January this year after reading civilsociety.co.uk’s stories about the decision by Citizens Advice’s auditor, Baker Tilly, to resign the account in protest at the way that the charity accounts for its pension hole.

Citizens Advice does not include its pension liability on its balance sheet, a treatment that Baker Tilly disagreed with. The auditor qualified the charity’s accounts every year for four years because of it.

After the story broke, the Accounting Standards Board met to consider whether the relevant accounting standard, FRS 17 ‘Retirement Benefits’, needed to be amended. But it decided that it did not, concluding that the standard already provides clear enough guidance about how such deficits should be treated.

Instead, the ASB decided to pass the baton to the Charity Commission, as the relevant regulator, in the hope that it would take the matter up with Citizens Advice. The letter from Roger Marshall read: “The Board has no information on the specific case other than that which is publicly available but considered it appropriate to draw the matter to your attention, given that you are the appropriate authority to liaise with the Citizens Advice Bureau in relation to this matter.”

Jennifer Guest, a project director at the ASB, told civilsociety.co.uk that the Board basically agreed with Baker Tilly over the matter, and wanted to know why the Commission had not contacted Citizen's Advice about it.

When contacted by civilsociety.co.uk this week, the Commission said it had never received the letter. So the ASB resent it yesterday.

Citizens Advice has since appointed Crowe Clark Whitehill as its auditor. 

• The May edition of Charity Finance will explore in detail the situation with pensions liabilities in the UK's biggest charities.