Archived: GLO Ministries: charity review

This is a review of the organisation that has a website in the name GLO Ministries.

GLO Ministries has an online invitation to give. It’s got ‘ministries’ in its name, so it’s most likely a charity.

The Australian charities regulator, the ACNC, in their Factsheet: Making sure your donation gets to where it needs to, gives “some steps to consider to help make sure your donation is going where it is intended.”

1. Check the organisation’s name.
2. Ask for identification from anyone seeking a donation.
3. Be careful of online requests for donations.
4. No tax deduction doesn’t mean the charity is not a legitimate one.
5. Find out more about how the charity says it uses donations.

Here are the answers for GLO Ministries:

1. There is no charity under that name on the ACNC Register:

A search on ABN Lookup gives a strong possibility, G.L.O. Ministries Limited:

This leads to a charity in the same name. Although none of the information under ‘Charity Details’ on the Register matches the information on the GLO Ministries’ website, both street addresses are in Riverstone NSW. So, although the spelling is wrong^[1], and there is no ‘Ltd/’Limited’ on the end of the name on the website, we have a match^[2]. (As G.L.O. Ministries Limited doesn’t have the necessary provisions in its constitution, it is not entitled to omit ‘Limited/Ltd’ when it uses its company name.)

2. NA

3. G.L.O. Ministries Limited make a request for donations on their website, but you cannot give via the website.

4. G.L.O. Ministries Limited gives a tax deduction for a donation to one of its two funds, ‘GLO School of Team Ministries Building Fund’. (They have another DGR fund, but it is not mentioned. And charity itself is not, as they say in a note on the giving page, ‘a Deductible Gift Recipient endorsed by ATO’.)

5. The audited account of how the donations are used is the Financial Report 2017 on the ACNC Register. Within that there are two statements that give information on how the donations were used. Most donors think in terms of cash, so if that’s you, you might turn first to the Statement of Cash Flows. What you might not know though, is that you should first turn to the Notes to the accounts (Notes to the Financial Statements in this case) to check out the ‘Basis of preparation’.

Do you provide or give things to, receive things from, or have oversight of, or review, G.L.O. Ministries Limited? Perhaps you are a student, or a prospective student at the GLO College of Ministries, or one of the ‘almost 200 people worldwide’ who are ‘partnering with’ the charity [Directors’ Report, Financial Report 2017], or one of its 22 volunteers [AIS 2017], or one of the donors who collectively gave $692K? If so, can you ring G.L.O. Ministries Limited’s office and request that they prepare financial statements that answer the question or questions you have about the charity? I very much doubt it. You are therefore ‘potentially interested in the information provided in general purpose reports’^[3].

You are therefore in the wrong place – I only have access to the published accounts of G.L.O. Ministries Limited, and the directors^[4] of the charity, under the ‘Basis of preparation’, say that the accounts are a ‘special purpose report’ (not a general purpose one). This means that they think that you don’t exist^[5]. End of review^[6].

1. The ‘Historical Details’ page on their ABN record shows that they changed their name back to G.L.O. Ministries Limited in 2002 (from GLO Ministries Ltd). Why is the website still in the old name, all these years later? ↑
2. For the previous review, see here. ↑
3. From Objective of General Purpose Financial Reporting (SAC2), www.aasb.gov.au: ↑
4. Not shown on the website, but from the ACNC Register (under ‘Responsible Persons’):Malcolm ArnoldAndrew CowellAllan Driver

   Kenneth Harding

   John Quilliam

   David Scott

   Craig Stokes

   Oskars Stubis ↑

5. This implies that the directors have made a decision the charity is not a reporting entity. Not only should they make this explicit, but they should say why they believe this. ↑
6. I sent a draft of this review to the charity. They…did not respond. ↑