Archived: SIM: charity review
Care: At least some of the information about this charity is no longer current. Use the ‘Search charity names’ box to see if there is a later review. If the latest review has a message like this, you are welcome to make your case for an updated review via email to ted@businessbythebook.com.au.
This is a review of the organisation that has a website in the name SIM.
On that site there’s a request for donations and a way to do without leaving the site.
SIM’s tagline is ‘Serving in Mission’, 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.”
- Check the organisation’s name.
- Ask for identification from anyone seeking a donation.
- Be careful of online requests for donations.
- No tax deduction doesn’t mean the charity is not a legitimate one.
- Find out more about how the charity says it uses donations.
Here are the answers for SIM:
- There is no charity under that name on the ACNC Register. But rolling through the 70 entries that come up for ‘Sim’, one finds one with ‘Australia’ on the end of ‘SIM’. Plus, two others that, because of their name and the fact that they are in the same suburb, look related to the first one:
The website footer confirms that the website belongs to SIM Australia at Penhurst[1]. (Although SIM is registered to omit ‘Ltd’/’Limited’ from the end of its name, it is still not registered to drop the ‘Australia’.)
2. NA
3. SIM Australia’s “web address begins with ‘https’ and…there is a closed padlock symbol next to the website’s URL in the address bar”. A secure way to give to the charity.
4. ABN Lookup says that SIM Australia cannot give you a tax deduction. But this doesn’t fit with the information on one of the giving options:
Presumably this is explained by the fact that SIM Australia also collects for one or both of the ‘SIM’ charities mentioned above:
5. The giving page doesn’t give the name of the charity to which you are giving if you give to this ‘simaid’. We should be able to tell from inspecting the accounts of each ‘Simaid’ charity, but despite these accounts of the Trust being due by 31 March 2018, they have yet to be lodged, nearly four months later[2]:
End of review[3].
- For last year’s review, see here. ↑
- Last year, they lodged accounts, but they were the wrong ones. ↑
- I sent a draft of this review to the charity. Like last year, they did not respond. ↑