IN THE wake of a criticism raised by a whistle-blowing trustee, the trustees of the Additional Curates Society have announced that nearly £1 million might be distributed on to PCCs over the following five years to support the associated fee of ministry in poor and populous parishes.
But the annual report during which the pledge is ready out, filed with the Charity Commission last week, also includes the identification by the ACS’s recent auditors of “weaknesses within the charity’s internal control environment, including deficiencies within the authorisation of expenditure”, leaving them unable to “obtain sufficient appropriate audit evidence to supply a basis for an audit opinion”.
The firm, Jerroms, writes within the report: “We also encountered missing records and documentation that hindered our ability to confirm the completeness of certain income and expenses categories. . . The nature of the anomalies identified, and the continued nature of the investigations, have limited our ability to conclude whether material misstatements exist. The potential financial impact of any adjustments which may be required might be material and pervasive to the financial statements.”
The auditors’ statement follows a criticism raised with the Board of the ACS in 2023 by a former trustee, who compiled a dossier raising a series of concerns concerning the governance of the charity, including the right use of its funds, which now total £6.6 million (News, 9 May).
This asked questions on expenditure on the charity’s Birmingham properties, valued at greater than £1 million, and which comprise the home provided for the General Secretary, Canon Darren Smith, and the ACS offices. Concerns were raised concerning the financial governance of the charity, listing a scarcity of annual budget, register of interests, quarterly management of accounts, and monitoring or sign-off of the General Secretary’s expenses and use of the company bank card.
“There isn’t any allegation being manufactured from financial impropriety,” the trustee wrote. “However, the absence of basic financial processes would definitely make financial impropriety easier to undertake and harder to detect.”
In last 12 months’s report, the ACS reported that no worker earned £60,000 a 12 months or more, and that the General Secretary’s salary was £54,000. The latest report states that one worker received between £90,000 and £100,000 last 12 months with “aggregate compensation” of £94,680. Other expenditure included money put aside for potential furlough repayment of £89,245. The 2023 dossier had raised concerns about ACS’s compliance with the terms of the Government’s furlough scheme throughout the pandemic.
In response to the criticism, the ACS appointed recent auditors and instructed an independent solicitor to “perform a comprehensive review of the society’s governance arrangements and to supply wider charity law advice . . . to be certain that the charity has effective processes and internal controls in place to support decision-making in the very best interests of the society, in furtherance of its charitable purposes, and in compliance with all legal and regulatory obligations”.
Between 2018 and 2023, the variety of grants made for the support of clergy ranged from only one (in 2023, totalling £10,000) to 5 (in 2018, totalling £49,500). The dossier noted that at no point up to now six financial years had expenditure on supporting clergy posts reached even one tenth of the charity’s total income for the 12 months. In response to questions from the Church Times, the ACS said in May that up to now two months it had greed £243,000 value of grants to parishes and was “actively encouraging applications”.
The annual report says that the trustees have a “five-year grant allocation programme that would potentially distribute £997,264 on to Parochial Church Councils to support the associated fee of ministry in poor and populous parishes. Many of those grants have been awarded to enable dioceses and parishes to recruit clergy and due to this fact the actual amount given will rely upon the success or otherwise of an appointment.”
No recent stipend grants were made in 2024, but £98,832 was paid on to PCCs, up from £91,318 in 2023, but lower than expenditure on staff costs of £119,000.
The annual report states that the ACS trustees “had believed that the fundamental emphasis of the Society needs to be targeting the encouragement of vocations inside the normal Catholic constituency and can be considering ways during which this work may be continued in the long run.”
Total income for the 12 months was £508,480, down by 26 per cent, but unrestricted donations from supporters increased by 36 per cent to £105,055. Total expenditure for the 12 months was £545,455, up by 26 per cent and included “governance costs” of £60,00 (up from £14,000) including £46,262 in legal fees.
A separate internal investigation can also be under way “in relation to certain operational matters,” the annual report says. “As on the date of approval of those financial statements, the final result of this investigation stays uncertain, and the financial impact, if any, can’t be reliably estimated.”
On Tuesday, an announcement from the trustees said that it could be inappropriate to comment further until the independent review was published. They were “committed to responding to any recommendations appropriately and with full transparency” and to “finding ways as to how it may well best use the charity’s significant resources, including the supply of grants to parishes, to further the mission of each the Church of England and Church in Wales within the mid twenty-first century”.
Of the nine trustees, 4 are recent, having been appointed up to now nine months. Canon Smith stays the General Secretary. The key risks set out in the most recent annual report are a decline in donations and vocations.
