Benchmarking Best-in-Class Corporate governance Practices in UK SME (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises) Charities: Accountability and Transparency.

Abstract

Abstract The study explores the implementation of corporate governance, accountability, and transparency (the Core Constructs) within UK SME charities to provide the most sort after answers to address the endless criticisms, demands for scrutiny, and requests for accountability and transparency to enhance their performance and credibility. This area of study is sparse on Small and Medium-sized charities, very little has been written on corporate governance, on occasions coupled with accountability or transparency but never with both. Nothing similar to this study has been done. The study seeks to investigate whether UK Small and Medium-sized charities implement effective corporate governance within their organisations, also to deduce whether Small and Medium-sized charities operate in the “Best-in-Class” area/zone implementing best practices, of accountability and transparency. The methods used to investigate this were the application of semi-structure interviews, survey-questionnaires, and the examinations of Trustees’ annual reports of the UK Small and Medium-sized charities incorporated from the sample, and further implemented triangulation to verify the results. The key findings revealed that the results provided similarity between the semi-structured interviews and the online questionnaires, while the annual reports did not match the findings of semi-structured interviews and the online questionnaires. The semi-structured interviews, the online questionnaires and annual reports revealed that different non-standard corporate governance practises are employed across UK Small and Medium-sized charities. The significance of the study is that the UK Small and Medium-sized charities do not operate within or could be classed within the “Best-in-Class” arena. Therefore, deduction could be made that the ‘Core Constructs’, corporate governance, accountability, and transparency, have not been effectively implemented, within the UK Small and Medium-sized charities.