The treasurer left in March and took the working knowledge with him. The accounts were nearly ready, then they were not, and the deadline went past while the board was dealing with something else. Nobody has the login. It has been four months.
The instinct at this point is to treat it as an administrative backlog. The Charity Commission does not. It regards failure to file annual documents as misconduct or mismanagement in the administration of the charity – its own words, in its own published findings. That is a statement about the trustees, not about the paperwork.
The good news is that a single late year is recoverable and the route back is short. What follows is what you owe, what default means, the order to fix it in, and what happens if it becomes a pattern.
If your board has lost track of what is outstanding and who is responsible for it, our charity governance support starts by establishing where you actually stand.
What you were supposed to file, and by when
Your annual return goes to the Commission within ten months of the end of your financial year. A 31 December year-end means a deadline of 31 October the following year. A 31 March year-end means a deadline of 31 January.
What you submit depends on income:
- income under £10,000 – report your income and spending
- income above £10,000 – complete the full annual return
- income above £25,000 – also file your trustees’ annual report and accounts
Now the part that catches boards out, and the reason so many CIOs end up in default without realising. Those income bands are the Commission’s rule for charitable companies and unincorporated organisations. A CIO files an annual return and its accounts, whatever its income. A CIO turning over £8,000 has the same filing obligation as one turning over £80,000, and the Commission’s guidance on preparing a charity annual return sets out how to do it.
Charitable companies have a second, earlier deadline. Accounts go to Companies House within nine months of the end of the accounting reference period, a month before the Commission’s ten months. Two regulators, two deadlines, and only one of them charges you for missing it.
What being in default actually means
The Commission does not fine you. What it does is publish. Your charity’s record on the public register shows the position, and the people who look at that record are the people you would rather did not see it – funders assessing an application, a prospective major donor, a corporate partner doing due diligence, a candidate deciding whether to join your board.
Companies House is different, and if you are a charitable company, the money is automatic. Miss the nine-month deadline and a penalty is imposed by law, with no discretion involved.
The penalty doubles if accounts are filed late in two successive financial years. Delivery means actual receipt at Companies House in the correct format, so accounts returned for an unsigned balance sheet and then refiled after the deadline attract the penalty as though they were never sent. An extension has to be applied for before the deadline passes, and is granted only where the reasons are exceptional.
Two further points from the Companies House guidance that trustees of charitable companies should know. Directors are personally responsible for delivering the accounts on time – and in a charitable company, the directors are the trustees. And not filing accounts is a criminal offence, for which directors can be personally fined in the criminal courts, separately from and in addition to the penalty against the company.
The appeals guidance is worth reading for what it rules out. An appeal is unlikely to succeed on the basis that you relied on your accountant, that your accountant was ill, that these were your first accounts, that you were unfamiliar with the requirements, or that another director was responsible for preparing them. That last one is the treasurer defence, and the registrar has heard it.
The order to put things right in
Sequence matters here, because doing it in the wrong order creates work.
Start with access. Each person needs their own My Charity Commission Account, set up with an individual email address and password – these are not shared logins, and a board with one account held by someone who has left has an access problem before it has a filing problem. Get at least two current trustees set up.
Then file the oldest outstanding year first and work forward. A charity two years behind that files only the most recent year is still in default.
File it right rather than fast, because corrections are expensive. The annual return must be completed by the charity itself, and the Commission cannot make amendments on your behalf. Changing anything already submitted means applying in writing for a full reset, after which the whole return has to be completed and resubmitted from the beginning. An hour spent checking figures before you press submit saves considerably more afterwards.
Update your registered details in the same pass. Update trustees who have joined or left, the correspondence address, and the contact email. The Commission treats keeping registered details up to date as part of the same duty as filing, and it says so in its findings on defaulting charities. If someone has resigned and the register still lists them, our guide to removing a trustee and handling resignations covers what else needs doing at the same time.
And put the deadline somewhere it cannot be missed again. Not in one person’s calendar; on the board agenda, with the filing position reported at every meeting between year-end and submission. Our guide to running a trustee meeting covers how standing items work, and the trustees meeting minutes template gives you somewhere to record that it was checked.
One late year is a lapse. A board that cannot say what is outstanding has a different problem.
If nobody is certain which years are filed, who holds the login, or when the deadline falls, the filing is the symptom rather than the cause. A free clarity call will establish what is actually outstanding and what has to happen first.
What happens if it keeps happening
The Commission runs a standing class inquiry into what it calls double defaulter charities, opened under section 46 of the Charities Act 2011. A charity comes into scope where it has failed to file for two or more years in the last five, has been given a final warning to comply by a specified date, and is still in default on the first working day after that date.
Two things follow from that definition. You get a warning before the inquiry, so nobody arrives there by surprise. And it takes a pattern rather than a single missed deadline.
What the inquiry does is not subtle. In its report covering April 2024 to March 2025, the Commission used its information-gathering powers 78 times to obtain bank records and financial information for the years with missing documents, and used its powers to direct trustees to prepare and file the missing documents 130 times. Two charities were found to have ceased to exist or not to be operating, and were removed or in the process of being removed from the register.
Failure to submit the annual documents may also be a criminal offence in its own right.
Why late filing is rarely just late filing
Here is the part that should concentrate a board’s attention. In that same reporting period, eight charities in the class inquiry were referred on to separate statutory inquiries; not because of the late filing, but because of what the overdue documents revealed once they arrived.
In one, the Commission identified concerns about the management of conflicts of interest and payments to connected parties. In others, financial and governance concerns about how the charity was being run. Several had been persistently late for four or five consecutive years, and in one case had failed to comply with a Commission order to file.
The pattern is worth stating plainly. Late filing is often how the regulator finds everything else. A board that has not filed for two years is usually a board that has not been reviewing its finances quarterly, has not documented what it delegates, and has arrangements nobody has looked at properly. The accounts arrive, and so does the scrutiny.
Which points at what actually prevents this. A board that reviews the numbers each quarter knows in month seven whether the year-end accounts will be ready. A board with a current budget has figures to work from rather than starting cold. Knowing whether you need an audit or an independent examination tells you how long to allow, because an audit is not something you arrange in the final fortnight. Filing responsibility should be named in your scheme of delegation rather than assumed to sit with whoever is treasurer, and the risk of missing it belongs on the risk register if you have been late before.
And a new trustee should be told during induction where the charity stands on filing, rather than discovering an outstanding default in their second year. It is a duty carried by every trustee collectively, not by the treasurer alone, which is precisely why the Commission treats a failure as a failure of the board.
Filing on time is a by-product of a board that knows where it is.
The charities that never miss a deadline are not the ones with better spreadsheets. They are the ones with a financial rhythm through the year, clear responsibility for the return, and a board that sees the position before the deadline rather than after it. Our ongoing support plans put that rhythm in place.
