Twenty charities have been removed from the Public Register of Charities.
It follows an increase in complaints to the Charities Regulator by almost 40% in Ireland last year.
The figures are contained in the recently published Charities Regulator’s annual report.
Chief Executive of the Charities Regulator Madeleine Delaney said that most complaints about charities relates to their governance.
“Removal of a charity can be for a number of reasons, and it can be an ultimate sanction if something is done wrong,” she said on RTÉ’s News at One.
“But very often, and in the case of the 20 that were removed by us this year, that related to charities who hadn’t been filing annual reports.
“And when we followed up with them, what we found was they were actually no longer active as a charity, or in fact they had disbanded completely, but they hadn’t gone through any process to tell us or to update the register.”
Ms Delaney said there were now 11,500 charities in Ireland, which was similar per capita to England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
“The public decide how many charities there are. There is now a charity test under the Charities Act. So if you want to be a charity, to call yourself a charity, you have to be on the register. And that means you have to meet certain requirements,” she said.
You can’t use the word “charity” unless you are registered, she added.
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Ms Delaney said that the regulator encourages people looking to set up a charity to look at the materials available on their website and to inform themselves of the responsibilities involved.
“With the benefits of being a charity, there are also important obligations,” she said.
“We would also encourage existing charities to look at working together, be it to go to a formal merger or just simply to collaborate and cooperate, to share resources, to share those responsibilities that are involved in running a charity.”
She said that people considering making donation should look for the charity’s number and look it up on the regulator’s website.
“Because that is a unique identifier that they get when they are put on the register of charities. Then we ask everybody to go to checkacharity.ie,” she said.
“Then you’re looking to see are they up to date with their information. Again, that could be a red flag. It could be innocent, but there could also be problems.”
Ms Delaney said that there was a problem with leaflets sent around to homes looking for old clothes or donations.
“We do follow up every time but the leaflets are carefully worded to avoid being able to identify who’s behind it. We do again say ‘look for that registered charity number’, go on to checkacharity.ie and look and see if it’s there,” she said.
“In order to bring a prosecution, because it is an offence to hold yourself out as a charity if you’re not, we would need sufficient evidence and unfortunately the leaflets themselves aren’t providing that evidence for us.”
