National Post (National Edition)
Better charity reporting a moving goal
In five short years, the CAQueen’s Centre for Governance and its Voluntary Sector Reporting Awards have helped many charities become more transparent and accountable to their donors.
It’s a constantly moving goal that sets new benchmarks every year.
Steve Salterio, director of the Centre at School of Business, Queen’s University, says one of the benefits of the VSRA program is it allows charities and other stakeholders to share evolving best practices for financial reporting.
“It is valuable to recognize those that are doing good and reporting clearly, and it is also good to give other charities that are struggling exemplars of those charities that are actually meeting internationally established criteria for excellence in reporting,” he says.
“We felt there was a need to let the charities know that the public was expecting more from them,” Mr. Salterio says.
“This was confirmed by independent research carried out by Imagine Canada and other co-ordinating bodies in the charitable sector that made it abundantly clear that Canadians were not happy
There was a need
to let charities know the public was expecting more from them
with the level of stakeholder accountability that they were getting from Canadian charities if we were to maintain the culture of charitable giving in Canada.”
Researching and setting standards for charities is one of the key roles for Cathy Barr, senior vice-president, Imagine Canada. “Over the last 10 years, I have seen a shift to a greater emphasis and greater demands from the media, from elected officials and from the public for more information about what charities and non-profits are doing, where they are spending their money and how they are spending their money,” she says.
“That heightened interest caught a lot of charities off guard,” she says. “They had been used to the assumption that they were good organizations doing good things, they weren’t used to that scrutiny, so they weren’t necessarily doing the best job that they could or giving a lot of attention to the reporting.”
One of the sponsors of the VSRA awards is PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), a leader in accounting and related services in Canada.
Brenda Lee Kennedy, an associate partner at PwC, says organizations owe it to their funding sources to provide clear information about how the money is used.
“Those organizations are quasi-public entities by virtue that they are either publicly funded through donations or publicly funded through grants and funding,” she says. “So at the end of the day there is a standard that is required of them to be fully transparent about their organizations and the impact that they are having.”