Paula Sussex, chief executive of the Charity Commission, has defended a suggestion that the Charity Commission is perceived as being “toothless”, but has said that new powers will enable it to do even more.
Sussex was speaking at the ICAEW’s annual conference for the charity sector on Shaping the future of the charity landscape. Following her opening keynote, a delegate suggested that newspapers know more about what is going on in charities than the regulator, adding that his worry is that the Commission “doesn’t have the powers to be a real regulator”, and called it “a toothless wonder”.
He questioned whether the general public see the charity as a pro-active regulator, or someone “that is covering its backside”.
Sussex responded by saying he is “spot-on about the powers”, and that this is something that will be addressed in the forthcoming Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Bill which is currently making its way through Parliament. She said that the bill will “precisely plug some of those gaps”, including strengthening powers to effectively remove trustees.
She said: “I think we are a wonder, I don’t think we are ‘toothless’, but I do think we need more powers to become more ‘toothsome’”.
Sussex also said that the Commission tracks very closely what the public says about the regulator, and that the public is “endorsing the shift towards robust regulation”.
She also said that the delegate is right that the Commission needs to do more to be a pro-active regulation, which is why it is embracing the use of data analytics to help understand the state of charities day-to-day, and to do better pro-active targeting of them.
She said: “Can we go further? Yes, absolutely. Can we go as far as the Daily Mail? No, we are a regulator. We are quasi-judicial and you will not see us holding a court over the summer.”
“Often some of the work we do with charities we do do more quietly. We publish, but sometimes we have very tough conversations without publishing them, depending on the complexities or sensitivities of the case.”
Commission to target single defaulters
Sussex also told the room of finance professionals that the monitoring team at the Commission will be also looking for single defaulting charities, not just those that are late filing their accounts on more than one occasion.
She renewed a call for charities and their auditors to use the digital format for uploading accounts and not sending them by Royal Mail, saying that although they could “probably afford to process the 8,000 accounts that you are sending us in paper every year, we would really rather spend that money on the higher risk case work”.
When asked about a move for just one system of logging accounts with the Charity Commission, Companies House and tax authorities, Sussex said that joint filing proposals have been being discussed for the last nine months but the business case is “not as compelling as you may think”, and there are difficulties in aligning the IT systems. But, she said: “We have it on our agenda and we are very likely to do it.”
Sussex said she was keen for the input of finance professionals and lawyers into how effectively the Commission is communicating.
