things you need to know

The Stewardship account is designed to be straightforward, so you can spend more time giving and less time worrying about the fiddly bits. But there are some important things you need to know, so please take time to read the following:

  1. You need to be paying enough tax in any one tax year to cover the amount reclaimed by Stewardship on your giving. Tax means any income tax (at whatever rate) or capital gains tax. If you cease to be a taxpayer, or have not paid enough tax in any year, please let us know immediately. If too much tax is recovered on your giving you will be liable to refund HM Revenue & Customs.
  2. The tax we recover must be based on the tax paid by you personally, not that paid by another person (e.g. husband or wife).
  3. You are free to cancel your Gift Aid declaration at any time. Just let us know, preferably in writing, if you wish to do so. Unless and until you cancel your declaration, we will continue to reclaim tax on all your giving.
  4. Legally, the funds in your account belong to Stewardship and,as charitable funds, cannot be returned to you. We have discretion in relation to any gifts that you request to be made.
  5. If you request to make a gift to a recipient not yet known to us, we will need them to go through our registration process. This is likely to mean that the first gift will take longer to process than subsequent gifts.
  6. You can give to a huge range of causes with an account, but there are some limits you need to be aware of:  
    • We cannot make gifts to charities whose objectives or activities are inconsistent with our primary evangelical Christian purposes (e.g. another world religion).If a large gift is proposed, we often need to conduct checks in relation to the recipient. This is most likely if they are a private individual (i.e.Christian worker or Bible College student) or an overseas charity/NGO. This may delay the gift being made and, regrettably, in some cases may mean that we are unable to make it.
    • There are restrictions on making gifts to support Christian workers who are close relatives of you or your spouse (“close relative” means child, grandchild, parent, grandparent, brother, sister, or the spouse of any of these). If you are considering doing this, please check with us first.
    • We are afraid that gifts cannot be made to a Bible College student who is a close relative (as defined in the previous point).
    • When it comes to an overseas charity, gifts cannot be made without sufficient verification of its legal existence, charitable and operational activities. This can sometimes be difficult.
    • You cannot use your account to pay membership subscriptions, or to buy goods or services from charities.

Stewardship retains 3% of each payment into your account (including the added tax), leaving an extra 25% to give. Part of this represents the cost of gift administration and is subject to VAT. The remainder goes towards the cost of servicing your account membership.

Despite this all sounding a bit strict, we’re actually quite a nice bunch and would be happy to help you make sense of anything that may seem a bit complicated. Just give us a call on 020 8502 8560 or send us an email to giving@stewardship.org.uk.

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