The closure of Charity Business

The closure of the independent finance outsourcer,Charity Business, is raising all sorts of questions about how the sector can be protected from organisations who court our business and then fail to deliver.  NYA, outsourced all our support functions as part of a total remodelling of our business which left us with a core group of expert staff managing a range of programmes designed to support youth worker and the youth sector. Our experience of outsourcing has generally been positive but our experience of Charity Business has been consistently poor. Their client relationship management was really weak to the extent that our constant complaints led to the then CEO of CB, Mark Freeman, becoming our relationship manager for a short period before he want off sick, never to return again.  Every payroll run put us on a knife edge and their incompetence included many mispayments to staff, the inland revenue and our pension  provider. Towards the end we had the Director of Ops, Richard Overy, processing our payroll personally and it was still wrong!

. Thank goodness we never gave them direct access to our cash, but I know others did and presumably their funds are now locked away until the Reciever has done his stuff. We were lucky in that CB's dreadful performance led us to decide to move to a different outsourcer and their closure notice just beat our lawyer's letter to them terminating their contract with immediate effect. All we are waiting for now is getting our data back and fortunately we had already transferred payroll last month.

Interesting that we are now being literally inundated with offers of support, including bizarrely from ex staff who were so awful under CB setting themselves up as new companies. We also hear that the CEO of CB has already started a new company.....

Anyway my question is how do we as a sector protect ourselves from rogue traders? Charity Business was on the NCVO approved provider list but removed themselves when the complaints started to flow in. NCVO didn't, to my knowledge, look in to this and didn't let members know the status had changed!

I have had nothing from our sector bodies, either NCVO or ACEVO offering support to charities affected and I don't  know if anyone is talking to government about the implications of this closure on many voluntary organisations. Generally it just feels like anybody can come in and abuse our trust and none of our infrastructure bodies care..

 Would really like to know the views of others on this issue.

Fiona