Blog post: Changes to the annual return will facilitate better engagement with individual charity trustees
By Fiona Muldoon and Orla Waterson, Monitoring and Compliance Managers at the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland
Recent changes to the Commission’s annual monitoring return aren’t just about collecting more data from each charity, but are aimed at supporting the Commission, as the charity regulator, in its engagement with charity trustees.
As it moves into the next stage of its development, the Commission is dedicated to becoming a more enabling regulator and part of this commitment involves communicating with charity trustees at an individual level, to ensure they are better supported and informed about matters relating to their charity.
Our experience has shown us that when we engage with a charity on a compliance matter, the individual charity trustees may be unaware of previous communication with the regulator. As soon as we make them aware of any issues regarding their charity, they can be swiftly resolved. This is why it will help all of us to ensure charities are well managed, by being able to directly contact the individual trustees who are responsible for the charity, rather than just one central contact. As part of a pilot exercise the Commission sent final reminder letters to the trustees of 1,135 charities, reminding them of their annual reporting deadline, when ordinarily the charity contact only receives an email reminder. In response to the pilot, we were contacted by numerous trustees who advised they had delegated the task and weren’t aware the deadline date was approaching. The impact was that 95% of charities in the reporting month filed their accounts and reports on time, compared to 80% in the previous year.
One of the ways the Commission will facilitate this kind of engagement is via changes to the annual reporting process, which were recently implemented. As of the beginning of October 2022, all charities must now provide contact details for the trustees including their individual email address and mobile telephone number.
It will take some time to gather trustee details through annual reporting, however, this is a major step in the Commission being able to communicate with trustees more regularly and directly, rather than solely communicating with one point of contact for the organisation.
It is imperative that anyone completing the new annual monitoring return on behalf of a charity, prepares in advance so they have all required information, including trustee contact details, to hand before they start the online form. They should also check all the other details held by the Commission (contact details such as postal address, email address and contact telephone number) to ensure these are up to date.
Alongside the change outlined above, the annual monitoring return also now features six new question areas related to risks such as safeguarding, the processing of personal data and fundraising. Not all questions apply to all charities of course as the return is streamlined by income, with smaller charities required to complete fewer questions than larger charities.
For more information on the changes which have been implemented see the Commission’s new guidance document ‘How to complete the AMR – 10 minute guide’ available on our website here.
The changes to the annual monitoring return were the subject of an eight week consultation in 2019, the results of which can be found on the Commission’s website here.