Group back account?

seatbeltnoob

Hi


Me and a few family members have got together to pool a charity fund. We want to pay towards the fund via standing order throughout the year (£10 a week per person). We then send the money to UK registered charities when we feel there's a disaster, charitable cause we must help. Or if there is someone in the family who needs money. My brother died a few years ago, we originally set up the fund when his widow who suffers from depression is in need of money. She struggles with bills and her emotional health isn't allowing her to get to work.


Currently I am the administrator of the funds and the money comes into my personal bank account and because of that I am responsible for reporting how much we have raised and what we have spent the money on. Trouble is I find this a chore and I want to give up this responsiblity. It's a bane on my side. A few times I have miscalculated the money (there was less money than what the report said), so I had to pay the money in out of pocket to balance the books.


My issue is, I dont want the funds to be in my personal account, various reasons, including not wanting HMRC to find this account and think I am hiding undisclosed income. (I am self employed and making 20K a year).


I'm also stoozing, so have £10K in savings. I would like to avoid a HMRC investigation if possible



I want a trust account of some sort which were all are signatories and ideally free to operate, an account which all members can view the account, and the responsiblity is out of my hands,


I am the "trusted" and "organised" one out of the lot, so the responsbility was thrust onto me. But I really dont like doing this admin work. being self employed I have enough admin of my own .

Savvy_Sue

I'm fairly sure any of the major banks would open a normal current account with multiple signatories, and unless you have a formal constitution and committee roles then it's going to be more difficult to open anything else.

But I am not sure there is any of doing it without some formal admin and reporting. I'd therefore work at training the next most trusted and organised family member to work alongside you ...

Mistral001

You should think about forming an legal entity such as a club or Ltd company. That way you could have a separate bank account

nmn

Mistral001 wrote: »

You should think about forming an legal entity such as a club or Ltd company. That way you could have a separate bank account

This is a good idea to keep things separate but on balance you might find this would create more admin, more problems, more cost, and more scrutiny -- none of which are likely to be worth it for such small sums of money - assuming you don't have 100's of participants.


Your primary concern seems to be an HMRC investigation caused by mistreating these payments as personal income. Why do you think that risk is significant enough to be concerned about?

Nevertheless, the risk would surely be the same for whoever is responsible for the money; so although a hospital pass might seem like a personal relief, you could end up exposing another, less financially capable, family member to the same.

Your main snags are going to be that you're too small to be worth dealing with the admin for, and that your aims are quite broad (giving to registered charities & gifting to family members on what appears to be an ad hoc basis)
One option would be to split your money into a trust (for giving to registered charities) https://www.cafonline.org/my-personal-giving/long-term-giving/trusts although note the 10k minimum needed (and CAF is quite expensive) and the remainder (for family/non charitable giving) maintain a separate personal bank account for.

rach_k

How about a community account with a high street bank? If they require governing documents etc, you could just write one - you should probably have one anyway, so that everybody is clear exactly what you're doing and how things will be done.

JCS1

Would a paypal money pool work?

https://www.paypal.com/uk/webapps/mpp/money-pools