Some data on whether charities are doing what the ACNC has asked them to do

We had occasion to look up a couple of ACT churches on the ACNC register recently. What we found was interesting. And made us wonder. So in no time we had a spreadsheet full of information. An Advanced Search for all charities with an ACT address, a status of ‘Active Registered’, and the ‘Charity Entity sub-type ‘Advancement of Religion’, gave us the additional information of the ABN, name, town/suburb, and postcode. For 255 charities. We then looked up every 5^th one and recorded whether

1. the 2013 Annual Information Statement (AIS 2013) had been lodged
2. there was a red ‘Overdue by 7 months’ message
3. the AIS 2014 had been lodged
4. it was a Basic Religious Charity
5. there were Responsible Persons recorded
6. a governing document had been lodged, and, via the ABN
7. the charity was incorporated.

Additionally, for all charities with a name beginning with an A through to the Canberra Korean Church we recorded items 1 and 2 above. The sample for this information was therefore 119 charities (and included our own record).

Here are the results:

• 55% had no ‘governing document’ (normally a constitution)
• 27% were blank under the heading ‘Responsible Persons’
• 27% had only one person under this heading. (The circumstances where only one responsible person would be correct are very limited.)
  • If the above two results were in any way due to the absence of an AIS 2013, this would only explain 1/5th of them.
• 18%, although incorporated, and therefore ineligible to be a Basic Religious Charity, had a ‘Yes’ in this box.
• Even with the extra three months the ACNC allowed for the AIS 2013, 10% had a red ‘Overdue by 7 months’ message
• Only 4% had lodged their AIS 2014. (The majority are due by the end of this month.)
• 2% were not required to submit an AIS 2013 (because they started not long before the end of 2013-14). (We are one of these charities.)
• 25% were not incorporated but were not recorded as a Basic Religious Charity. (It is possible that such a charity was ineligible on other grounds, although with religious bodies this would explain only a few, at most, of these cases.)

If you think that charities advancing religion in the ACT would be reasonably representative of such charities Australia wide, and I can’t immediately see why they wouldn’t be, then you have the state of the entire database for this sub-type.

As for an extension of the results to the entire 60,000 odd database? I’ll leave that to you to decide.