8 June 2018
The Charity Commission has announced that it will be introducing a tailored annual return later this year, which will include additional questions covering the following areas:
- Income from outside the UK – questions will be added requiring a breakdown of income received from overseas governments, overseas charities, other overseas institutions, individual donors resident overseas and unknown overseas sources.
- Overseas expenditure – the questions will cover the charity’s methods used to transfer money outside the regulated banking system and about monitoring controls and risk management.
- Salary and benefits in charities - there will be more questions on salaries, which will include asking for a breakdown of salaries across income bands and the total amount of employee benefits for the highest paid member of staff. However, the Charity Commission will stop short from publishing details of the highest paid member of staff on the public register.
Although these new questions are voluntary for 2018, they will be mandatory for the 2019 annual return onwards so, if they could be applicable to your charity, it would be worth giving some thought to them now to ensure that your accounting records are sufficiently detailed to enable you to answer these questions.
If you would like to discuss ways in which you can make improvements to your accounting systems so that the information required can be collected and sorted more easily, please contact your usual UHY adviser or nearest UHY charity specialist.
