Charities entered into the Scottish Charity Register are required to submit an Annual Return and accounts to us. Charities with an annual gross income of £25,000 or above are also required to submit a Supplementary Monitoring Return. These documents must be submitted within 9 months of the financial year end for accounting periods that start on or after 1st April 2006.
Documents not submitted on time
Where charities fail to submit their documents on time, we will take the following action:
- immediately after the deadline for submission, a charity's individual entry on the Scottish Charity Register will indicate that the Annual Return is "overdue"
- ten weeks after the deadline the Annual Return status of the charity's entry in the Scottish Charity Register will change from "active" to "passed to compliance" to indicate that the charity has been referred to the Compliance Support team.
- charities that have still not provided an Annual Return, including the Supplementary Monitoring Return if appropriate, and/or accounts within 6 months of the deadline for submission will be listed as defaulting charities
Charities that fail to provide OSCR with the required documents within 12 months of the deadline for submission may be considered for removal from the Scottish Charity Register.
Continued failure to submit documents
Section 45 of the Charities and Trustee Investment (Scotland) Act 2005 gives us powers to appoint an accountant to prepare accounts for a charity. Should we make use of these powers, charity trustees will be held personally liable for any costs incurred and the expenses of the person preparing the accounts.
Section 29 of the 2005 Act, gives us powers to serve a notice on charity trustees requesting documents or information which we consider necessary for the purposes of an inquiry. Any person who fails to comply with such a requirement, without reasonable excuse, is guilty of an offence and is liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding level 4 on the standard scale (£2,500) or to imprisonment for a period of up to three months, or both.
Searching for defaulting charities
You can search for defaulting charities by:
- The charity's name
- The charity's Scottish charity number (SC0xxxxx)
- The local authority area, that is either the main operating area for the charity, or is where the principle office of the charity is located.
Defaulting charities are added to this list monthly. Charities will be removed from the defaulting charities list once the required documents have been received, checked and passed as complete. Please note that this validation process may take several working days. The Annual Return Status of the charity's entry in the Scottish Charity Register will then change back to "active".