Joint filing of accounts to the Charity Commission and Companies House is a “much more likely outcome” than charging charities fees to file their accounts with the Commission, the regulator’s public meeting heard yesterday.
Neville Brownlee (pictured) intimated to the meeting in Nottingham that charities did not have much to fear in the way of charges for filing accounts, saying that the “next evolution” in filing would probably be joint submission of accounts rather than fees.
Commission chief executive Sam Younger said there would be more clarity around funding of sector regulation once the government has published its report responding to Lord Hodgson’s review of the Charities Act 2006 and the recommendations of the Public Administration Select Committee, expected within the next few weeks.
However, he said his sense was that there is “not much of an appetite” for making the sector pay for its own regulation, in light of current economic difficulties and the government’s desire to encourage voluntary activity.
And while the Commission sympathised with that general proposition, it is also essential that it soon finds a long-term and stable source of income to allow it to regulate effectively.
However, Younger said that any fee-charging structure would have its own challenges too: “We would have to be careful we didn’t end up with a system whose administration costs were greater than the income that it brought in.”
And as fees would have to be aligned to a charity’s income, that would bring with it a danger that the regulator’s activities would end up becoming geared to the needs of the largest. “So there are some complicating factors,” he admitted. “But the next phase of this will come with the government’s response – we can’t get into charging anything without legislation.”
Brownlee then added that some kind of joint portal with HMRC that would allow the 30,000 charitable companies to file their accounts just once, is a much more likely outcome in the next evolution of the filing regime, than charges for filing with the Commission.
