The Charity Tax Group (CTG) campaigns on behalf of charities to seek changes in tax legislation and administration.

Charity Tax Map

Introduction to the Charity Tax Map

The main objectives of the Charity Tax Map are to provide:

  • An explanation of the provisions of the tax system with which charities have to comply and the applicable reliefs [SECTION A]
  • A study of the cost and impact of taxation on the sector. [SECTION B]
The Charity Tax Map sets out in some detail the 18 different taxes that can affect charities and the multiple tax regimes and procedures with which charities have to comply in order to administer them. We are confident that all the main taxes and reliefs are covered but some are covered in more depth than others where the implications for charities warrant it. For example, the majority of the sections of the VAT Act 1994 affect charities in some way because there is no single part of the Act that specifically deals with charities. Therefore, the VAT element of the Map is some 30 pages whereas import duties are covered in just a couple of pages.

Methodology

CTG agreed with the sponsors - the Nuffield Foundation - the structure and parameters for the project. CTG's Management Committee then agreed the scope of the taxes to be included in the Charity Tax Map and several of CTG's professional members with specific knowledge of law and taxation wrote sections which matched their areas of expertise.

31 charities were asked to complete a detailed questionnaire about their tax affairs, and the costs of administering and complying with each of the taxes. The work also incorporated responses from an earlier survey about irrecoverable VAT to which 87 charities responded.

It is CTG's intention to repeat this exercise to enable more detailed information to be gathered from a larger sample of charities.

Download the Charity Tax Map

The Charity Tax Map (published 3 February 2011) can be downloaded from here (file size 3MB).

The associated press release can be found here:

Contributors to the Charity Tax Map

The list of contributors to the Charity Tax Map can be found here.

The Nuffield Foundation kindly funded this project, but the views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Foundation.