The Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC) says thousands of charities have shared valuable information about their work by submitting their first ever information statement to the Commission. More than 25,000 of the estimated 30,000 charities with a 31 March deadline completed their Annual Information Statement on time. This involved a series of questions about the core information and the activities and beneficiaries of registered charities.
ACNC Commissioner Susan Pascoe AM expressed her gratitude to charities completing their first ACNC annual reporting requirement. She said the information was building Australia’s first accurate, national register on charities.
The ACNC said it was seeing a very high level of compliance in its first round of reporting, with over 83% of charities submitting their reports on time. Ms Pascoe extended a special thanks to the charities that completed the optional questions and volunteered to provide their financial reports and governance information. Some 20% of charities took the additional step of including their financial reports with their Annual Information Statement, and over 22,000 have submitted their governance documents. All of these are published on the Charity Register.
The ACNC urged charities with a 1 July to 30 June reporting period that had not completed their Annual Information Statement to do so as soon as possible.
The ACNC has developed a bulk lodgment form that has proved particularly useful for corporate trustees administering multiple trusts, or the denomination administration offices that look after a number of religious charities. The form, which is an Excel spreadsheet, allows charities to submit multiple 2013 Annual Information Statements in one go, without having to enter the same information repeatedly. So far, the ACNC said 3,200 of the submissions have been through this process.
Source: ACNC media release, 1 April 2014
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