More than 25,000 Australian charities of the estimated 30,000 charities with a 31 March deadline completed their Annual Information Statement on time. This involved a series of questions about the core information and the activities and beneficiaries of registered charities.

Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC) Commissioner Susan Pascoe said that this input would help the ACNC capture valuable data about the charitable sector that was previously unavailable.

“This information is building Australia’s first accurate, national register on charities,” she said. “This is freely available online to the community, providing new levels of transparency and accountability.”

The ACNC said it was seeing a very high level of compliance in its first round of reporting, with over 83 per cent of charities submitting their reports on time.

Ms Pascoe added that information gathered from charities that chose to answer the optional questions and volunteered to provide their financial reports and governance information would increase the ACNC’s knowledge of charities and their modes of operation, and be useful to donors, funders, and the broader community.

The ACNC said that information collected through Annual Information Statements is helping to build a holistic picture of the Australian charity sector. The information is available on the ACNC Register, which the ACNC has labelled as “the first credible database on charities in Australia”. The information forms the ‘Charity Passport’ and is offered free-of-charge to state and federal government agencies. Open source ACNC Register data is also available at www.data.gov.au

Charities with a 1 July to 30 June reporting period that have not completed their Annual Information Statement are urged to do so as soon as possible. The easiest way to do this is online at www.acnc.gov.au/2013AIS

The next ACNC reporting deadline is for charities that report on a calendar year, from January to December. For these charities, the 2013 Annual Information Statement is due by 30 June 2014.