Scope and Approach

Benefacts is a company limited by guarantee, without share capital, established in 2014 with financial support from government and philanthropies to promote the accessibility and transparency of Ireland’s nonprofit sector. It does this by defining the scope of the Database of Irish Nonprofits, identifying and harvesting the contents of public registers, cleaning, classifying and where necessary digitising the data, and deploying extracts in a range of web-based and other services including a free public website and this first annual Benefacts Nonprofit Sector Analysis.

The data for this report is derived from the regulatory disclosures of 19,505 nonprofit organisations, including registered charities, under the provisions of open data licenses. Employment, financial and governance data from 2013, '14 and '15 was derived from the financial statements and other regulatory disclosures of 8,097 nonprofit companies or charter bodies, some of which are charities.

For data on charities, Benefacts has relied on open data files published from time to time by the Charities Regulator, the Department of Education and Skills, and Revenue on their respective websites, and on the website of the Library of the Houses of the Oireachtas. Benefacts does not "scrape" the websites of regulators or nonprofits without their knowledge or approval.

This report was prepared and published by Benefacts on the basis of publicly available information, internally developed data and other sources believed to be reliable. It was completed on 20th April 2017, and published on 28th April 2017.

While all reasonable care has been taken in the preparation and completion of this report using documents retrieved from regulatory sources (including financial statements prepared by third parties) and input by us into our database, we do not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information contained in it and accept no responsibility for any errors or omissions.

Most of the information in this report is derived from the financial statements of 8,097 nonprofits

Regulatory filings by nonprofits are the raw material from which the database is derived. Benefacts acquires, cleans and normalises the contents of these regulatory documents — including constitutions and financial statements — as soon as they are filed on any public register and released under open data licence terms.

No effort is required of the nonprofits concerned: Benefacts is able to access the materials like any other member of the public from the online venues where they are published, under open data regulations.

This is the most extensive and robust-ever analysis of Irish nonprofits

The data used in this report is extracted by Benefacts from financial statements and other regulatory disclosures for 2013, 2014 and 2015 for all of the nonprofits in scope, where these are available for re-use under open data licence terms, and from the additional disclosures of major philanthropies.

"All of the nonprofits in scope" includes not just 8,014 companies limited by guarantee, but also bodies established by statute including higher education institutes and some voluntary hospitals, entities that are constituted as friendly societies or trade unions, and unincorporated associations of various kinds.

Charities are a subset of all nonprofits

The definition of "nonprofit" used by Benefacts is derived from an internationally-recognised standard originally developed in an important worldwide study of civil society originally led by the Center for Civil Society Studies at Johns Hopkins University and now adopted by the UN, Eurostat and national statistics offices around the world. To be included in the Database of Irish Nonprofits an organisation must be

1. Organised: organisations must have some kind of formality and institutional reality
2. Private: organisations must be institutionally separate from government
3. Non-profit distributing: organisations must not return any surpluses generated to their owners or directors
4. Self-governing: organisations must be in a position to control their own activities and have their own internal procedures for governance
5. Voluntary: participation in these organisations must not be mandatory

By definition, this includes all registered charities, and it excludes organisations that are directly controlled by government.

The analysis available is as comprehensive as current open data disclosures allow

In 2015, the latest year for which a full set of regulatory disclosures is available, three important new regulatory provisions came into force:

1. The Charities Act, 2009 some of whose provisions were commenced in October 2014. Section 40 of the Act provides that those c. 8,000 nonprofits which had already secured recognition as charities for tax exemption purposes were deemed to be charities but were required to register with the new Charities Regulatory Authority (known as the Charities Regulator) within eighteen months - later extended to two years. According to open data files or other information provided by the Regulator, approximately 5,000 charities had completed this process by the end of Q1 2017 (when this report was prepared), and 447 charities have been registered under Section 39 of the Act.
2. The Companies Act 2014, which for the first time permits smaller companies limited by guarantee to file abridged financial statements - a provision long available to smaller private companies. 27% of nonprofit companies (24% of charities) have elected to do so in 2015. This means that the public is able to see the names of their directors, the auditor’s report, the balance sheet stating assets and liabilities, and notes to the accounts including the number of employees and total payroll expenditure. No analysis of income or expenditure (including sources of income) is provided in abridged accounts.
3. Financial Reporting Standard 102 (FRS102), which is statutorily binding on most small or medium sized companies, whatever their for-profit or not-for-profit constitution. FRS102 introduces an important new provision which requires companies to report the number of cases where the total remuneration of its employees exceeds €70,000, in bands of €10,000. This means it is possible for the first time to know how many higher-paid employees any company has - including incorporated charities - and the full set of reported employee remuneration data from 2015 therefore informs this analysis report.

Further trend data will be analysed when 2016 records are available

Most of the data from which this report has been derived has been extracted from the audited financial statements of nonprofit companies. These are prepared up to nine months after the financial year-end, after which they must be placed on the public record.

Some nonprofits had not filed financial statements for 2015 by the end of Q1 2017, and others were subject to significant re-organisation, for example incorporation, group consolidation or merger. In general, Benefacts has only provided trend data where like-for-like comparisons could be made 2013-2015.

Benefacts plans to make this an annual publication, released in the first quarter of every year once the analysis of all of the financial statements filed in the prior year has been completed.