CHARITY COMMISSION VOICES SERIOUS CONCERNS OVER THE TRANSPARENCY OF LANGLEY GREEN MOSQUE AFTER INVESTIGATION REVEALS CHARITY FAILED TO SUBMIT THREE YEARS WORTH OF ACCOUNTS ON TIME(BRITIAN)

THE group running Langley Green Mosque has been warned about its future conduct after failing to submit three years' worth of accounts on time.



An investigation was launched by the Charity Commission into Crawley Islamic Centre and Mosque (CICM), which runs the mosque in Martyrs Avenue, last November because it had not filed annual accounts between 2010 and 2012.



It is a criminal offence to not submit these financial documents.



CICM's last known income was £261,864 in 2009 and the independent regulator has serious concerns over the charity's transparency since then.



Attempts to contact the CICM by phone were made on October 18 but failed and a final warning was sent requesting the overdue documents by November 8.



This deadline was missed but a trustee was reached on November 14.



A report, published last Friday, states: "One of the trustees informed the inquiry that they were not aware of the charity of trustees receiving any notifications or reminders, but would arrange for the trustees to meet and address the issue as soon as possible.



"The inquiry was also informed of the ill health of the accountant originally appointed by the charity."



CICM, which has been a registered charity since 1977, returned the overdue annual accounts for 2010, 2011 and 2012 over Christmas and New Year.



These were scrutinised before the commission agreed CICM was no longer defaulting on its accounting obligations on January 5 this year.



Farakh Jamal, a CICM trustee, said there had been a miscommunication issue but when the accounts were handed over there was no problem.



He said: "We had an accountant who we gave all of the accounts and documents to in time after we had gone through them in-house.



"He failed to sign them off and then fell ill.



"It would not have been right for us to just sack him at this point so we gave him time to recover and look over the accounts.



"We then got another accountant to sign them off and they were all correct.



"It was our practice to complete three years' worth of accounts in one go.



"We had a problem with our server being down, so the commission had trouble reaching us.



"We didn't know how serious it was until we had received the letter.



READ MORE

http://ift.tt/1iRU7ib