Charities are judged on trust. Keep yours defensible.

A charity's real asset is the public's willingness to give, and that asset does not survive a published inquiry. When the Commissioner of Charities opens an inquiry under section 10, the findings are routinely made public, named individuals can be removed or barred, and the press reports it. In recent years the Commissioner has barred individuals from fundraising altogether after breaches of the fundraising regulations. For an IPC the stakes are higher again: IPC status is a privilege reviewed against conditions, and losing it means losing the ability to issue tax deduction receipts, which for many charities means losing the donor base.

Charity boards carry duties personally. Governing board members are trustees of public money, the Code of Governance sets out what the regulator and the public expect of them, and the annual Governance Evaluation Checklist is a public declaration of whether the charity meets it. A checklist answered optimistically, without the policies behind it, is worse than a candid one: it becomes the document the charity is measured against when something goes wrong. The recurring failure points are familiar from our investigations work in companies: conflicts of interest between board members and vendors, fundraising proceeds handled informally, and complaints about senior people with nowhere safe to go. Tips remain the most common way fraud is detected (ACFE, Occupational Fraud 2024), and in a charity the whistleblower is often a volunteer or donor, not an employee, so the channel has to be open to them too.

On the horizon: the sector's disclosure expectations keep rising with each Code revision, and the Charity Transparency Framework rewards charities that go beyond the minimum. Grantmakers and institutional donors increasingly ask for the same governance machinery that listed-company sponsors ask for.

We draft the governance suite a charity board can actually point to: conflict of interest policy and annual declarations, whistleblowing policy with an escalation route that bypasses implicated management, anti-bribery rules that cover fundraising agents and vendors, and data protection documents that reflect how the charity really handles donor and beneficiary data. Each document is mapped to the Code of Governance so the Governance Evaluation Checklist can be answered honestly.

When something surfaces, whether a whistleblowing report, a questioned related-party transaction or a Commissioner of Charities query, we run the investigation under legal privilege and advise the board on its duties, including whether and how to engage the Commissioner. A consultant's report into a charity scandal is disclosable; properly structured legal advice may not be. Our outsourced whistleblowing channel takes reports from staff, volunteers and donors in English or Mandarin, with lawyer triage on every report.

We also train boards and management committees on their duties, in plain terms, because most charity board members are volunteers doing this after work.