Saturday, 20 February 2010

The Charity Commission is pathetic I am unimpressed

I feel very unimpressed with the Charity Commission in the UK, their employees get their salaries but then I end up having to do their jobs for them and having to tell them that if they don't their jobs I will involve Parliament. See below.
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Dear Charity Commission caseworker,

I am now formally replying to your email of 23 October 2009 regarding a serious incident. Unfortunately Charity Commission employees have not done their jobs so I have had to do your work for you.

Firstly, according to the facts released from the Freedom of Information Act request, you say that no serious incident report was filed on [the registered charity in London] last summer, their trading address being on ___ _____ London.

Thus, I must point to your definition of what a serious incident is as far as the Charity Commission is concerned. An incident / string of events that has taken place in a charity is considered as serious if it has resulted in a significant loss of funds. An incident is considered to be serious if it poses a significant risk/ amount of difficulty to the charity’s work. An incident is considered to be serious if it causes serious injury to the reputation of the charity.
To give you some plain facts, because [the charity] employed the grossly dishonest Mr ____ until ____ of 2009 and I reported his dishonest activities very extensively, this damaged the reputation of [the charity that employed him] very significantly. I have the documents to prove that even [the charity itself] considered its reputation to be seriously damaged. The same documents indicate this difficulty significantly interfered with its work as a registered educational charity to ___ , and from looking at their brochures I could also see that they lost a lot of sponsorship money and lost the support of a number of respectable organizations. Logos that would normally be there were missing. I know that I informed 800+......

You really must understand that ... (a paragraph is omitted on this blog), By definition this is a serious incident because a serious incident is something that ‘threatens the work of the charity’.

You must now read the 2 documents that prove the truthfulness of what I am saying, this is from 2009. In the first half of 2009, [the charity] tried to intimidate and threaten me into shutting up about the gross deception but as they failed, they tried to send lawyers after me last summer. You must now examine the 2 attached documents to see the damage of reputation and interference with the work of the charity. Of course there is my side of the story in defence but I needn’t bore you with such long documents that combat hostility.

Please note that the law firm wrote ‘we have advised our client (the registered charity) that it is entitled to substantial compensation for the injury to its reputation and feelings as to which we invite your proposals.’ The law firm actually blamed the wrong person for its troubles but this sentence in the first document does indicate that even [the charity] regarded its reputation to be seriously damaged that they wanted a significant sum of money from me to compensate for it. Of course they failed to fetch the sum of money but this is beside the point, they failed to fetch the money not because its reputation was fine but because what I said was absolutely true and fully provable so I was not responsible for paying them damages–
You should note from the second document that the charity's standing and reputation experienced a significant drop last summer, even [the charity itself] acknowledged this by instructing a lawyer to write to me.

It should be reassuring for both the Charity Commission and [the registered charity] that as Mr _____ was eliminated from the staff in ___ 2009 (something that even Earl *** would have insisted on even if [the charity] wanted to drag on with the problems, with the summer ahead of them the way that it neglected the problems from January 2009 so that they exploded by the summer of 2009). The storm has been calmed by the exit of the sociopathic [man]. He will probably be prosecuted for ___ and any number of other criminal offences but this lot is fairly detached from the charity world.
I want to tell you that essentially the Charity Commission is over half a year late in catching up on its paperwork and this is a bit disgraceful on your part. The trustees of [the charity] were lazy, negligent and irresponsible in failing to report a serious incident by 2009 since its reputation was so substantially damaged. It was their responsibility to report the serious incident, not mine. They were too pathetic to do their jobs, and now I still have to alert you to the discrepancy between the Charity Commission Policy and what was not done that should have been done.
While the state of things are now more promising and I hope [the charity] will be able to thrive, I wish to remind you that reporting serious incidents is fundamentally important because of the Charity Commission Annual Returns. At the moment, it looks like the Trustees will sign the next Annual Return to say there has been no serious incident when in fact there was, so this will default on ____’s legal requirements as a registered educational charity.
Broadly speaking [the charity] and the bulk of its employees became the distressed victims of a difficult man with a massive criminal history so they obviously suffered a great deal. This is very sad and unfortunate but still, there are no excuses for NOT doing their paperwork and the Charity Commission also has no excuse for not doing the Charity Commission formal paperwork. Any less paperwork and logging of facts is a matter of negligence and this is unacceptable. Essentially negligence makes me feel anxious about charities in general. So far the regulation of the charity sector has been weak from your aloofness. It is not anything like robust and I think it is pointless for you to write down your policy while doing nothing much about it on this occasion.
Please note that you must complete your work as I have explained, at the end of the day this is only a little task. If you fail to follow up on what I have submitted to you, I can guarantee that I will involve Parliament, headed by the Prime Minister on 10 Downing Street. There is little that you can do about the [charity's] mess from last year but you must register it and recognize it for what it is. If you do not do your job, I can guarantee you that Angela Smith, the Member of Parliament responsible for the Third Sector, will have an issue with the ineffectiveness of the Charity Commission and you should note that a number of Parliamentarians have been acutely aware of the highly disturbing incidents that occurred at [the charity] already. Even they can tell you that the reputation of [the charity] has been seriously damaged. There is a combination of members of the House of Commons and members of the House of Lords who have talked to me directly about all of this.
I am afraid that I have less trust in the charity sector seeing how aloof the Charity Commission has been. Please reply to my correspondence once you have examined my points, and tell me what you wish to do. Like I said, I will be following up on this to the day that the Annual Return is filed for the registered Educational Charity that is _____ .
yours sincerely

[real name submitted]

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