The Scottish charity regulator OSCR has launched an outreach programme for umbrella bodies and other advice-giving organisations after identifying that basic errors in advice are being made.

OSCR launched in 2006 following the 2005 Charities and Trustee Investment (Scotland) Act and currently regulates over 23,000 charities. Its outreach programme will produce publications and deliver training sessions to umbrella bodies, local support groups, lawyers, accountants and similar organisations on matters such as completing returns, preventing fraud, becoming a charity and supporting charities in times of financial crisis.

The regulator will also provided targeted compliance support activities with organisations found to be falling short of following the 2005 Act. 

OSCR’s chief executive Jane Ryder said that the training was necessary to improve the quality of advice to charities to comply with regulatory requirements and improve public trust in charities.

"We are seeing increasing levels of compliance as charities master the reporting requirements." she said.  "But our experience is that as we enter the fifth year of regulation, we are still finding some basic omissions and errors and recognise a need for more consistent and locally accessible information about our requirements."

Details of the outreach training sessions are available here. Further training sessions on mergers and acquisitions, trading subsidiaries, dissolving your charity and Scottish charitable incorporated organisations (SCIOs) are also in development with a likely rollout of 2011/2012.