Today the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC) opened its doors as Australia’s first national, independent regulator of the not-for-profit (NFP) sector.
Unlike the NZ approach, Australian charities did not have to re-register with the ACNC. So data for 56,000 charities was immediately transferred from the Australian Tax Office to the ACNC.
The ACNC public register is searchable, but is fairly limited at the moment. It only shows the charity name, state/territory and ABN lookup reference (which is quite useful because it includes information about tax concessions and deductible gift recipient status).
Charities do have the opportunity to opt-out of being registered. For those that don't opt out, they will have to file their first Annual Information Statement (AIS) within six months of 30 June 2013 (or later if they have a late balance date). Although in this first year the AIS will not include any financial data, it will still provide information useful to researchers and other users.
Further down the track it will be possible to compare some of the NZ charity register statistics with those on the Australian register. In the meantime it's worth keeping an eye on the conents of the ACNC register. There are 28 charities which have "New Zealand" in their name, but no doubt many more Australian registered charities will have NZ links.
No comments:
Post a Comment