- This topic has 74 replies, 35 voices, and was last updated 7 years ago by footflaps.
-
Children In Need chartiy auction
-
johnx2Free Member
I bet you wouldn’t be quite so vocal if it was your children benefiting from the charities that CiN supports.
I’d rather they were part of a society with services to which everyone contributes and uses when they need to do so, rather than being grateful beneficiaries of charitable largesse.
johnx2Free MemberNo. Just that I’ve no interest in them or CiN and find the whole thing mildly distasteful.
maccruiskeenFull MemberSo if a charity has a contract with the government to provide services on behalf of the state for a fee agreed as part of a commercial arrangement then are they really a charity or just a service provider company?
They are a charity – without question.
mcj78Free Membernealglover
I’m not sure you understand how the income tax system works.It’s impossible to give money to charity, and somehow be better off financially than you were before, no matter how good your accountant is.
Ok… I certainly don’t remember insinuating that people are making money from the donations, as you seem to imply & what i’ve been trying to determine is if there’s any mechanism / loophole / clever tax deferral system whereby a company (not private individual) can offset corporation tax (or anything else) against charitable donations? For years there’s been whispers regarding tax loopholes for charitable donations, so can you or anyone tell me, absolutely categorically – from a qualified financial background in tax matters if that’s the case, or has it ever been the case?
Tried to have a look through the UK Gov tax site, but it’s slightly vague…
“Donating money
Your limited company can pay less Corporation Tax when it gives money to a charity or community amateur sports club (CASC).Deduct the value of the donations from your total business profits before you pay tax. “
Hence the mild confusion
headfirstFree MemberI’m with the OP on this, it strikes me as very public ‘willy-waving’, and the amount that people have to spend on these jollities is eye-watering. If they are so filthy rich and are that charity-minded why don’t they just quietly pop a cheque in the post?
It’s like a parade of lottery-winners, but with the catch-phrase “it can’t be you as you’re not a multi-millionaire”.
They should raffle off all of the packages, not a token one or two, as has been said it could well earn CiN more money too.*switches to radio 4 as well*
highlandmanFree MemberAn awful lot of public service is now provided by the voluntary sector. In some cases, with executives paid very handsomely indeed for their time. Just being a charity does not stop individuals becoming quite wealthy from the charity’s funds.
Half of the money ‘donated’ to CiN does not reach good causes. Sorry to burst the bubble, but this one is a cynical scam promoted by some in the establishment to help massage their egos. It’s just a shame that so many good and honest folk are taken in and donate. if you want to do something worthwhile with your spare £5, take it to a local foodbank or similar local entity doing real work in hard up communities (or whatever cause you like- just don’t throw half of your fiver away to the profiteering entities behind CiN).
I agree strongly with the comment above about a ‘raffle’; this is so much fairer but it still needs to be more tightly controlled to prevent large amounts of cash being filtered off – between £1.25 & £2.60 from every text message fiver gets diverted away to other organisations, before CiN even begins to pay its own overheads & advertising!!!
edlongFree MemberThere’s so much ill informed rubbish spouted on this thread it’s hard to know where to start. But since I’m a qualified accountant and work for a charity, I’ll have a stab at it anyway…
the sceptic in me wonders how much of these charitable donations are paid through a company & deducted from their tax liability
A couple of people have tried to address this one already, but the message seems to be missed so I’ll pointlessly reiterate it anyway – a donation doesn’t come off the liability, it comes of the taxable profit / income (depending on whether company or person) – so if an entity (person or company) has a marginal tax rate of 20%, a donation of £100 will reduce their tax liability by £20, so it still costs them £80.
wonder if anyone’s ever submitted an FOI request to see where the % of donations come from – personal or business accounts?
Very doubtful that they have – most people would read up a bit on who and what the FOIA covers and realise they’d be wasting their time.
…many of whom employ all manner of financial jiggery pokery to avoid paying as much tax as possible…
Good point actually, but perhaps not in the way it was intended – people are exercised by people giving tax efficiently and also having a side moan about them being tax efficient generally. We seem to have landed on 20% as the benchmark for illustrations (hence I’m using it too), but since the marginal rate for most people on PAYE is 20% and we get lots of famous statements about rich people “paying less tax than their cleaner” that’s potentially overstating it – and if those clever rich people have set up their affairs to reduce their tax already, the marginal gains on charitable giving reduce accordingly too – so if an entity is only paying, say, 6% tax then that £100 donation now costs them £94 and they’re only saving £6 in tax.
£1.1m directly to Children in Need will probably be better spent that £1.1m to the taxman.
That’s not the transaction, covered above.
secondly how can i reduce my overall tax bill and thus increase my disposable income by donating money
If you’re on PAYE it’s dead easy – just give 80% of what you intended to give to the charity(s) and tick the “gift aid” box. The charity gets the full whack and you can spend the 20% you retained on coke and hookers. You’re welcome.
‘Between £2.40 and £3.75 goes to Children in Need.’
Therefore someone, somewhere is making an awful lot of money from this scam.
And your mobile provider will also charge you for making the donation!!!Dunno the details but from the wide variability of the amount I’d take a punt on it being largely mobile networks. Telecoms company in charging for telecoms services shocker! Funny one this, I work for a charity. We have phone lines. The provider bills us. We pay them. Those rotten bastards are stealing money from our beneficiaries! Burn them! Or something. There will be other costs, dunno what they are, but despite what sometimes is portrayed on telly, you can’t just rock up to suppliers of goods and services you need and go “we’re a charity – give me it for free” – actually that’s not quite true, you can, and sometimes it works, but often not. If you’re lucky you might get a discount though.
As an aside, lots of telecoms companies provide facilities gratis – you know when there’s one of these telethons and they ask you to call in and there’s a couple of banks of desks at the nack of the studio with people (sometimes famous ones!) taking calls? There’s also probably a few thousand staff working unpaid in call centres up and down the country provided FOC for the evening by the likes of big telecoms companies and banks (the bastards).
From their somewhat reduced contribution, CiN have to then pay a huge lot of their own admin costs before they actually start doing any good.
Ah, the old “multi-million pound organisations run themselves and shouldn’t cost any money to administer” fallacy, hello old friend. The logical argument, with specific examples, has been repeated often enough that it’s not really worth going through it again – just find an old charity-bashing thread, I’m sure it’ll be there. So, a slightly different angle:
You know all those other multi-million pound turnover organisations? The ones who’s primary purpose is increasing shareholder value? Businesses? You know how they have head office and admin costs that don’t directly contribute anything to the bottom line, but just cost money? Do you think that, if it was possible to run the thing without spending all that money, they wouldn’t do that? Exactly. Other than sending out dividends, pretty much all the head office / back office costs for a charity are going to be the same, aren’t they?
So if a charity has a contract with the government to provide services on behalf of the state for a fee agreed as part of a commercial arrangement then are they really a charity or just a service provider company?
Err, it’s a charity. It can get complicated (lets ignore Community Interest Companies for now) but it boils down to purpose. The purpose of a company (if commercial) is to increase shareholder value (no, that isn’t necessarily the same as maximising profits, although it could be, but lets not go there). So that’s who the company is working for. There are commercial companies doing the same things as charities in lots of sectors – in many cases we compete for the same pots of public money for doing it, hell we might even work together on some projects. But they’re doing it for different reasons. The charity exists for its beneficiaries, and that’s who the trustees have to work for and have to be able to demonstrate that they work for. Our directors (trustees) have no personal financial interest. The business is working to enrich the shareholders. That’s who the Directors are accountable to. I could go on all day about that impacts (I used to work in the commerical sector so I do know what both look like) but the short version is that in every critical way, the ethos of the organisation is completely and utterly different.
Going back to the admin costs thing, I think one thing that confuses people is the difference between a business (as above, which charities by definition can’t be) and “being businesslike” which a multi-million pound turnover organisation damn well should be – since businesses are driven by shareholder value, they tend to be efficient, certainly compared to, say, the public sector. Accepting that you will have back office costs (please, can we just accept this?) like a commercial business, a charity should strive to make them as lean as possible, the difference being that rather than enriching shareholders, it releases more for direct benefit in line with the charitable purpose.
For years there’s been whispers regarding tax loopholes for charitable donations, so can you or anyone tell me, absolutely categorically – from a qualified financial background in tax matters if that’s the case, or has it ever been the case?
Okay, well, erm, actually, yes. It was called the Cup Trust – suggest a googling if you want details cos this post is already turning into a monster and it’s a little bit complex – in short they were manipulating gift aid rules on a massive, massive scale with entirely contrived “donation” transactions involving shares. The good news is that the government defeated them in court. That was a charity set up specifically as a tax dodge though, it’s not possible to scam via real donations to real charities.
In some cases, with executives paid very handsomely indeed for their time. Just being a charity does not stop individuals becoming quite wealthy from the charity’s funds.
It’s all relative isn’t it? I don’t know what your income is, but maybe it is substantially less than the Chief Executive of a charity that turns over millions each year gets so that looks like a lot to you. Maybe it’s less than the Finance Director gets too. But on the other side of the coin, those CEOs look at what people running equivalent sized (and complex) organisations in the private sector take home and, if money was their main motivators, might think that those private sector guys are getting way to much, or that they are getting too little. This wouldn’t happen because, if bringing in the cash was the main motivator, they wouldn’t be working for a charity in the first place.
I work in the sector and I’ve seen the industry surveys and benchmarking comparisons, and here’s how it breaks down (by and large): the charity people at the “bottom” of the pay scales generally get about the same or slightly more than their colleagues in the commercial sector, the middle rankers about the same or slightly less and the senior people significantly less. That’s the reality.
Half of the money ‘donated’ to CiN does not reach good causes.
That’s so far from true that it’s really not funny. It takes about a minute to get the summary financials up on the Charity Commission website, a couple more clicks and you can download their annual accounts. To save you the bother, latest figures (2016) for their expenditure:
Charitable Activities* £56.76M
Generating Voluntary Income** £4.32M
Trading to Raise Funds £0.75M
Investment Management*** £0.11M
Governance £0.52M
TOTAL: £62.46M*that’s the money reaching “good causes” then
** that’s fundraising costs, that is.
*** They had investment income of £1.24M so that looks like reasonable value.Somewhere under the ill-informed ranting there might be a serious, critical point to be made about CiN as a grant making charity – effectively such charities risk higher erosion of funds since they pass through two sets of admin costs – theirs, and then the admin costs of the charity that they give a grant to. It’s a criticism that can be levelled at all such charities and foundations, but they would argue that, but for their work, the funds wouldn’t be there at all.
Apologies for the length of that, there was actually quite a bit more I wanted to write…
manton69Full Memberedlong thanks for the response. It should actually be a standard text for anybody responding to this thread before they say anything. Not that it would stop them, mind. This is STW after all and we could argue with ourselves if nobody else was around 🙂
totalshellFull Memberi was just thinking that and edlong comes along and writes it all down.. chapeau fella..
sharkbaitFree MemberAccepting that you will have back office costs (please, can we just accept this?) like a commercial business
indeed, I know the guy who’s company supplies all the lighting at carfest and I can guarantee he doesn’t do it for free!
zilog6128Full MemberTelecoms company in charging for telecoms services shocker! Funblah blah blah (remaining condescending waffle deleted)
from the BBC website (concerning gift donations made by text): The following mobile network operators have waived their charges in order to allow the full £5/£10/£20 cost of the reply confirmation text messages (described below) to go entirely to support BBC Children in Need: 3, O2, Virgin, EE, Vodafone.
so they can do it for free. And yet, with this Chris Evans
scamraffle, suddenly there are “back office costs” of up to 52%? And no-one’s profiting from this?edlongFree MemberThe following mobile network operators have waived their charges in order to allow the full £5/£10/£20 cost of the reply confirmation text messages (described below) to go entirely to support BBC Children in Need: 3, O2, Virgin, EE, Vodafone.
so they can do it for free. And yet, with this Chris Evans scam raffle, suddenly there are “back office costs” of up to 52%? And no-one’s profiting from this?Dunno, that is interesting, I’d be very interested in knowing the answer to what and where those charges are – does anyone know? The answer to what it is would tell you whether someone’s profiting I suppose – if it’s third party services provided by a business then “yes”, if it’s costs incurred at the charity then “no”.
I suppose if its not telcoms costs and the only difference is that the texts are going into some sort of raffle (I don’t listen to R2 so I don’t know the details of what it is) then logically it must relate to processing the necessary data to do the raffle? I know that often, for example, charities use organisations like the Electoral Reform Society to administer raffles and the rules (statutory ones) around charity raffles and the like are (rightly) a bit onerous. Still, it seems like a big slice and if anyone has or can get any further detail on how it breaks down I’d love to see it.
Apologies that you thought I was being condescending btw – FWIW I find being told that those of us who work for charities should live on fresh air and self-righteousness a bit shit too.
edlongFree MemberOkay, I’ve had another look and I think you’re confusing different things (or deliberately trying to mislead):
– the bit you’ve quoted about “network operators waived their blah blah” seems to be taken from the donations bit – the details on the thing with the variable contribution (£2.49 to £3.75) is from a different place entirely, the “Chris Evans Breakfast Show Text Competition” which very much does not include the statement that charges are waived.
In fact, more than that, it is very clear if you quote the whole bit that at least some of the difference between what you pay and what goes in must be telecoms charges, since what it says is (my bold):
Each text message entry will result in a donation to BBC Children in Need of between £2.49 and £3.75 (depending on your mobile network operator).
Logically, if the amount varies by operator, the operator charges can’t all be zero now, can they?
If you look closely, the telecoms firm administering the Evans thing is different from the one doing the donations. That might or might not be pertinent, just something I noticed while reading through it.
pictonroadFull MemberWell said. Brilliant summary.
I’ve just listened to the show so I can actually try and understand what on earth the whinging and moaning is about. Somebody donated £1.1m (plus gift aid presumably) to children in need, in return they have the *pleasure of a private take that session.
The self congratulatory bit was Chris saying that “Elaine from London” is an amazingly generous person etc.
I really must be missing something or on another planet because I’m just not getting what’s wrong here in the slightest. 😐
He made it perfectly clear during the show several times that it was phone operator costs. They even had a special statement acknowledging how absurd the sums of money were and how grateful the charity is for every £ you can afford.
I remain confused by the thread after taking the time to actually listen to the show.
footflapsFull MemberI really must be missing something or on another planet because I’m just not getting what’s wrong here in the slightest.
Nothing, it’s just selfish people justifying their selfishness by lying to themselves about how evil CiN and Chris Evans are, so they can feel better about their self centred existence. The irony being they might genuinely feel better if they weren’t so selfish and self centred but are too blinkered to see that.
They raised about £3m this week.. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2J4Xwg9DkqLHlSnZFg11FPD/chris-evans-breakfast-show-auctions-for-children-in-need
dannyhFree MemberI’m just going to hark back to the question that someone posed about a millionaire donating a large sum and an elderly lady donating her last fiver.
Who most deserves a commendation for their donation?
The whole pretext for posing that question is so wrong it is actually quite depressing.
This kind of chip on shoulder pettiness in the context of CiN and what it supports is just staggering.
Do we think that “Elaine from London” rang in and said “you can have £x for your pitiful little cause so long as you mention my name on the radio”?
Loads of money raised for children in need of help?
Mission accomplished.
MoreCashThanDashFull MemberThis kind of chip on shoulder pettiness
The problem is that if you let the chips on your shoulders get too big they turn into blinkers.
MoreCashThanDashFull MemberAnd I defy anyone to watch tonight’s DIY SOS for CiN and begrudge anyone that supports what they do!
mcj78Free MemberCheers for the summary edlong – clears up a few things, I admit I had the tax angle wrong – I suppose many people still think of charities as organizations run by skilled volunteers with a bit of spare time out of the goodness of their hearts, like all the tradesmen from DIY SOS etc. instead of being run like like a corporation, but yes, obviously given the scale of the operation those are the necessities given the turnover & scale of the operation.
natrixFree MemberFWIW I find being told that those of us who work for charities should live on fresh air and self-righteousness a bit shit too.
Not on fresh air, no, but the sums that some staff are paid puts me off donating.
I used to sponsor a child through World Vision for 20 years or so. When I found out how much they were paying some of their staff (World Vision Canada CEO 300,000 base salary, (plus home valued at $800,000 dollar all housing expenses, including taxes, water/sewer, telephone/fax, HD/high speed cable, weekly maid service and pool/yard maintenance, fully paid private schooling for his children, upscale automobile and an $55,000 personal expense account for clothing/food, with a $125,000 business expense account) I figured that I wasn’t going to subsidise that sort of lifestyle anymore.
Similarly I was a member of Amnesty International from when I was a student until I heard that they paid some of their staff £500K redundancy packages, why should I subsidise that sort of bollox??
CiN have got £27 from me this year, I just hope they spend it wisely…..
edlongFree MemberOK, now I’m not a massive fan of World Vision as it happens, but that’s more about the fact that they are not always totally transparent about being an evengelical Christian organisation, and some evidence that some of their literature around sponsored children hasn;t necessarily stood up to scrutiny, but I notice that you haven;t provided a source for those figures, and a brief bit of googling suggests that they are cobblers – and from an email that has been circulating since at least 2005 so if they were ever right (I’ll come onto that in a moment) they probably wouldn’t be 11 years later.
Now I know it can be dangerous to take anything on the internet at face value without going to primary sources, but over the years I’ve found snopes.com to be a pretty trustworthy source of bullshit refutation, so I’ll go with their findings on the subject:
That organization provided us with the following information:
Dave Toycen [President and CEO of World Vision Canada] salary is $184,000 which is a matter of public record. As per our Board’s compensation policy, Dave and all of our top executives earn substantially less than executives who run comparable organizations. This policy is overseen by our Board’s Executive Committee and is regularly assessed by an independent external consultant. We disclose executive compensation as required to the Canada Revenue Agency.
Dave does not live in a $700,000-$800,000 home, and none of his housing costs are paid for by World Vision. He has lived in the same house outside of Toronto for more than 20 years. He travels economy class and does not use the most cutting edge technology.
Accountability in the use of funds and transparency to our donors are among our core values and they are taken seriously at World Vision. As evidence of this:
– The facts about our executive compensation, including the President’s renumeration, are published openly on our website;
– Our annual report and independently audited financial statements are also available for review.[/quote]
There’s plenty of bullshit circulating on the internet and by email. What I find depressing is the number of seemingly intelligent people who take such crap at face value when it can take literally seconds to do a bit of due diligence and fact checking…
natrixFree MemberDave Toycen is the CURRENT CEO of World Vision, I was referring to the CEO who was in place when I stopped donating
Also, the snopes figures don’t match World Visions own figures who say they currently pay $249,000
http://www.worldvision.ca/aboutus/Pages/Executive-Compensation.aspxMy brothers wifes sister happens to work for World Vision in the UK and is on a hefty wedge with a fancy beemer as a company car, so internet aside I’m no longer interested in funding those peoples lifestyles.
As for Amnesty it was reported in the Grundiad that Irene Khan, received £530,000 – four times her salary – on leaving Amnesty last year. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/dec/02/amnesty-international-staff-management-restructuring if you want to check……..
jambalayaFree Member@ed thanks for the considered and informative posts.
Large charities resemble a business organisation is some respects as that what actually works in the real world. If you want to see real charity abuse have a look at some of the celeb ones, Aussie cricketer Shane Warne is one of the worst I have seen.
meftyFree Membersome of the celeb ones
Or Bradley Wiggins (ducks for cover), and isn’t David Miliband on $600K at Thunderbirds.
edlongFree Member@ jamba
You want to look at bullshit “charities” working in the name of celebrities, suggest you start your google search with the words “Lance” and “Armstrong”
natrixFree MemberSo Livestrong pays its CEO $700,000 – glad I never bought one of those crappy yellow wrist bands…………
https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=13379
edlongFree MemberAlso, the snopes figures don’t match World Visions own figures who say they currently pay $249,000
http://www.worldvision.ca/aboutus/Pages/Executive-Compensation.aspxNow, I just followed the link you posted and it doesn’t actually say that, does it? What it actually says is
.. including taxable and non-taxable employer contributions to benefits such as company pension plan, Canada Pension Plan, Employment Insurance, group insurance, car allowance, life insurance and other benefits. When all of those are included, the president’s compensation is shown within the T3010’s category of $200,000-249,000.
and you appear to have made a bit of a leap by assuming that £200-249K means £249K ?
But it’s okay, because further up the same page it does tell us what his salary is:
our president, Michael Messenger, currently earns the top annual base salary of $215,000 plus a combination of taxable and non-taxable benefits.
so what we do know is that his total package is somewhere between £215K and £249K. Not quite the same as what you have stated above.
edlongFree MemberSo Livestrong pays its CEO $700,000 – glad I never bought one of those crappy yellow wrist bands…………
Personally, I’m not that hung up on what the CEO’s salary is, they may be worth double that if they deliver. My issue with Livestrong is that it is much more about “Brand Armstrong” and has been singularly unable over the years to back up any of its many outrageous claims regarding the contribution it makes to “fighting cancer” (which, as far as I’m aware, seems to be close to nowt).
I mean, you can go “he gets $700,000” or “blimey that Worldvision fella’s on close to quarter of a million” but what are you basing the outrage on? Can you tell me what the CEO of a Livestrong or a Worldvision should be getting? Why that much? I haven’t got a clue what the going rate for a Canadian Charity CEO is, the guy might be getting massively underpaid for all I know…
bikebouyFree MemberAnyone else go hungry and instead donated thier lunch wonga to CIN ?
natrixFree MemberI mean, you can go “he gets $700,000” or “blimey that Worldvision fella’s on close to quarter of a million” but what are you basing the outrage on
When I was struggling to get by I didn’t mind donating to help folk who were in need, but not to support fat-cat salaries.
eddiebabyFree MemberCharity auctions eh?
I’d have paid a tenner for a raffle ticket for that Yeti auctioned for Jenn but there was no way I could afford to bid and win it so I just gave money to a charity I support*. It made no difference in real terms to me, the odds of me winning would be slight anyway, but I felt excluded somehow… 😯Yeah, boo hoo for poor me. First world problems etc.
* RNLI and Macmillan. And money in the collectors buckets today.
edlongFree MemberWhen I was struggling to get by I didn’t mind donating to help folk who were in need, but not to support fat-cat salaries.
Fair enough, but assuming that you’re realistic enough to realise that an organisation is going to have running costs, and some of that will be what they pay to the people that run it, how do you assess what’s a reasonable amount and what is “fat cat”? What level of salary for the CEO would be low enough that you would think “fair enough” and keep donating? And how did you decide that that’s a reasonable number?
footflapsFull MemberThe £1m bidder for Take That is now selling tickets to the gig to raise money for another charity!
http://www.itv.com/news/channel/update/2017-01-30/take-that-to-perform-in-jersey-this-autumn/
The topic ‘Children In Need chartiy auction’ is closed to new replies.