Charities Gift Aid

Hi Yazi, we have just had a gift aid audit at work which I helped out on, but didn't lead, but might be of some help.

In terms of the audit trail we had to back up a sample which HMRC gave us details of (we gave over data to HMRC they picked the donations they wanted to include on the audit.

We are a large charity and have money coming in from different offices all over the country, using different systems to reconcile & bank the money - online, cash, cheques, via fullfilment houses, regional offices.

The Audit Trail consisted of 3 things:

1. header sheet HMRC gave - which gave the details of the donation we had to find.
2. As most of our donations are banked in large batches - the original banking sheet (with chq numbers) entry/online donation/report for fulfilment house or what ever form of back up we had that showed say the individual £5.00 donation as part of a large batch of say £20,000.
3. The entry on the bank statement to mirror the value of the batch.

You're probably aware but you can't claim gift aid on Charity Vouchers (some of our department had).

Try and find the largest value donations first, as the fine if you are liable to one (!) is worked out on the acutal donation value where no back up can be found. Sorry not saying you will, but I thought I would point this out as we did have error rates over the threshold and found we could minimise the fine by finding these!

And your second query - the gift aid decleration, it can be made to cover:
-a single donation,
-a range of donations,
-all future donations,
-donations made between and period of time
-or back dated up 6 years from the date of decleration, provided the donation was made after April 2006.

I hope this has been of some help, feel free to PM me on this or contiune discussing here, but I am going to be away from my PC tomorrow onwards so might delay in getting back to you.

Cheers,
Matt