SORP or SORP-ish?

Most people in the nonprofit sector are by now aware of Charities SORP.  This is a standard for financial reporting specifically devised to make the financial transactions of charities more transparent especially in terms of how and where charities have raised their funds and how the funds have been used.

Adoption of charities SORP is promoted as best practice by sector leaders and it forms one piece of the "Triple Lock" standard.  This is seen by the Charities Institute of Ireland as fundamental to restoring trust in charities (the other two elements of the triple lock are the Governance Code and the Statement of Guiding Principles for Fundraising).

Benefacts is the only source of information about which charities use the SORP standard in Ireland, where its adoption is still voluntary.  The Charities Regulator will be coming out soon with a mandatory financial reporting standard for Irish charities, generally expected to follow the FRS 102 Charities SORP quite closely.

By reviewing what all charities actually report in their annual published financial statements, Benefacts is able to provide a detailed picture about the emergence of higher reporting standards, which has never been available before now.

Currently, 488 organisations in the Benefacts database of Irish nonprofits say that they follow the charities SORP reporting standard. But on closer inspection, 87 of these have chosen to adopt some of the features of SORP and only 401 can in fact be seen to be fully in compliance in terms of the accounting policies as specificied by the SORP-making body authorised by the Financial Reporting Council (FRC).  Benefacts has used this compliance standard as verified by the entity's auditors as the benchmark for reporting Charities SORP compliance in the future.

Interestingly, a handful (17) of nonprofits that have adopted Charities SORP are not yet publicly registered as charities in Ireland.

In 2015, the total number of SORP reporters whose accounts are publicly accessible represented 9% of all registered charities. Here's the list.  We'll report on trends in SORP adoption again in our 2018 Sector Analysis Report.

Benefacts.ie is the only source of up to date analysis of all nonprofits (charities or otherwise) adopting the three standards (SORP, Governance Code and Statement of Guiding Principles for Fundraising). Use the facets on the left-hand side of the Benefacts search results screen to select which reporting standard you're interested in - see image for example.