After years of seeing less and less transparency about registered charities in Canada coming from the CRA, for various reasons, we now have one improvement from CRA in terms of disclosure about foreign activities.  I want to commend them for making this change and hopefully after the WE Charity scandals, etc. CRA will try to help the sector, donors, the public, and other stakeholders by providing better and more comprehensive information on this $260 billion sector.

CRA has now changed the way they export data and publishes that data on the T3010 online so that Schedule 2 dealing with foreign activities now has unlimited entries for Q2, Q3 and Q7.  Before there were only a few spaces for answers and the rest were provided by a charity in a separate sheet but not included on the online T3010.  Also, CRA seemed to have the unfortunate practice of only listing the entities in the order they were provided. Some charities provided the information in alphabetical order etc but some charities provided information from smaller at the beginning to larger on the to try to have as little of their actual operations be transparent.

This change only seems to appear in 2019 T3010s and not 2018 and earlier T3010s.

This list from CRA is still in the order that it is provided so I would encourage charities to provide the information with the largest first.

 

Here are the questions in Schedule 2 to the T3010

Question 2: [only 3 boxes were shown previously]

Were any of the charity’s financial resources spent on programs outside of Canada under any kind of an arrangement including a contract, agency agreement, or joint venture to any other individual or organization
(excluding gifts to qualified donees)? …………………………………………………………………………………… Yes No   If yes, provide details of the amount reported in question 1 on line 200, that the charity transferred to these individuals or organizations in the following table:

 

Question 3: [only 10 boxes were shown previously]

Using the table below, enter the countries outside Canada where the charity itself carried on programs or devoted any of its resources.

 

Question 7: [only 4 boxes were shown previously]

Did the charity export goods as part of its charitable activities? ………………………………………………………… Yes No
If yes, list the items exported, their destination, the country code, and their value

 

 

What does this mean for researchers and those study the charitable sector?  Before not all partners and all countries were listed so we always got an incomplete picture of the 5000 charities that conduct foreign activities which is an important part of the charity sector.

What does this mean for donors?  Donors will now see all the countries and all the foreign partners that the Canadian registered charity has.  If a donor is interested in a particular country or even the work of an intermediary or partner this may be helpful.

 

Conclusion

 

Thank you CRA for expanding the information available to the public.  Also, this shows that with the new CRA Digital Services it may be easier in future for CRA to show more information about charities.