Charity Fraud Awareness Week

The Charity Commission has updated its guidance, “Protect your charity from cybercrime” for Charity Fraud Awareness Week. The guidance is useful for all trustees and senior leaders on how to protect charities from harm.

Fraud can take lots of different forms, and the guidance reminds trustees how to protect their charities from cybercrime and fraud linked to fundraising, tax, banking and other issues.

Trustees should remain vigilant when it comes to protecting a charity’s assets and they have a duty manage the charity’s resources responsibly. This includes safeguarding the assets and resources as well as not exposing the charity to unnecessary risk. Sadly, charities can be exposed to fraud both externally and internally.

Good governance practices can assist in mitigating the risk of fraud and include having sound financial procedures and systems in place. Policies and practices on who has access to financial or other sensitive information are important, being aware of the Charity Commission’s guidance on fraud and promoting the guidance throughout the charity can assist.

Knowing what actions to take if a fraudulent event has been discovered and the ability to act quickly would assist in mitigating loss and harm to the charity in addition to any reputational impacts.

Charity trustees mustn’t be afraid to report fraud to the relevant authorities and remember to make a serious incident report to the Charity Commission promptly.

For more information on serious incident reports, please see a recent Article following the first part of our Breakfast Briefing Series “Protecting Charities – Avoiding Serious Incidents” [ add link to DHT Article].

The next part of the Breakfast Briefing Series will be held on 12th February and will look at Avoiding Serious Incident and Data Protection. To attend, please sign up here.

For more information on Trustee Duties, please see our latest blogs here