Why do Britain's biggest charities wait until deadline to file accounts? Andrew Hind investigates. 

The annual report and accounts give every charity a wonderful opportunity to connect with current and prospective supporters, and explain the great work the organisation has done in the past 12 months.

There can surely be no better way for a charity to demonstrate its commitment to being transparent and accountable than for it to produce an excellent set of financial statements and then get them into the public domain as soon as possible.

Not a priority

Why then does this not seem to be a priority for so many of our largest charities?

Research Charity Finance has undertaken for our main feature this month shows that over 50 per cent of the largest 100 charities take eight months or more after their year-ends to file accounts with the Charity Commission.

The average filing time for this group of sector leaders is 7.2 months.

A number of household-name charities filed their most recent accounts at ‘one minute to midnight’ – just before the ten-month statutory deadline was about to expire.

Save the Children and Macmillan Cancer Support, for instance, both filed just seven days inside ten months, while Salvation Army and Catch 22 were just three days away from being in default.

A further 21 of the top 100 only got round to filing their accounts with the regulator in the last four weeks of the ten-month window.

Rohan Hewavisenti, who moves from British Red Cross to join RNIB this month as group director of resources, rightly observes in our feature that filing your accounts at the last moment suggests you are only doing it because you have a statutory duty to do so. He believes that if charities are really serious about wanting to be accountable, and communicating well with stakeholders, they would publish their accounts as quickly as possible.

Don Bawtree, a partner at BDO, says in an article that “any charity could report within two months of its year-end, without disproportionate effort, if it wanted to”.

There is no inherent problem in charity accounting or governance practice which prevents significantly faster reporting from occurring – it is purely an attitude of mind. It simply requires FDs and their senior colleagues to prioritise the trustees’ annual report and accounts process.

A casual approach

In fact, in many cases it is even simpler than that. Our research indicates that 34 of the top 100 charities took more than three months to file their accounts after the audit report had been signed and the accounts completed.

I find that astonishing. It speaks volumes for how casual too many large charities are about public accountability.

And what are we to make of the fact that 20 of those leading charities, which have corporate status, filed their accounts with Companies House more than a month before – in some cases many months before – they bothered to file them with the Charity Commission? Say no more.

I challenge charity FDs to show leadership in this area and to radically improve the speed at which their accounts are filed in the coming reporting season.

If the fastest 20 companies in the FTSE 100 can get their highly complex group accounts filed on average within three months, surely the top 100 charities can do as good a job.

If accountability and transparency is to mean anything, the sector’s commitment to it has to start right here.

The headline and standfirst of this blog were updated on 02/04/2015.