Legal and Regulatory Compliance for Small Charities: New Checklist

New Checklist To Help Smaller Charities with Legal and Regulatory Compliance

A new Checklist of Ongoing Compliance for Small Charity has now been added to the collection of charity template documents. 

Identifying Relevant Compliance Issues

This checklist is designed to help charity trustees and other responsible individuals within a charity to formulate a checklist of key compliance issues specifically tailored to their charity. It can serve as a quick and convenient reference guide to assist them with meeting the need to be, and remain, aware of important compliance issues. 

System to Implement and Monitor Compliance

A wide range of compliance issues, routine and otherwise, apply to charities. It is essential that charity trustees implement a system that ensures that their charity meets all compliance requirements. 

The starting point is identification of the issues concerned. A checklist such as this one, adapted as necessary, can help to identify those issues. 

Trustees should follow up by ensuring at the beginning of each year that they have an adequate understanding of what they and their charity need to do to comply fully with all obligations and duties applicable to them during that year.

At regular intervals trustees should routinely check that each necessary compliance action point has been carried out fully, correctly, and on a timely basis since the last such check was made. 

It would be prudent to include an item on the agenda for trustees’ quarterly meetings that consists of a compliance report by the chair of trustees or a sub-committee of trustees (e.g. an audit committee). Such a report should be to the effect that all legal and regulatory matters applicable to the charity have been identified and dealt with as necessary, with any exception being specifically noted and an action plan included to correct any defaults.