The £1.65bn risk hiding in your corporate giving programme

Corporate giving has a blind spot, and it is getting more expensive. As companies push money out to more charities, across more countries, through grants, matching and employee-nominated causes, one question quietly moves from the background to the foreground: do you actually know who you are giving to?

In 2026, that is no longer a philosophical question. It is a compliance one.

The scale of the problem

Charity fraud costs the UK voluntary sector around £1.65bn a year (BDO). The detail is worse than the headline:

• In 2025, 34% of charities reported fraud or attempted fraud.
• Of those hit, 73% suffered a financial loss, and only 32% recovered it.
• 38% of perpetrators were insiders.
• 52% of charities expect the threat to grow into 2026.

(BDO; Consultancy.uk.) If fraud is that prevalent inside the sector you are funding, then some portion of any large, fast-moving giving programme is exposed to it. The money leaving your business does not stop being your concern the moment it lands.

Why this is your risk, not just the charity's

When your company runs grants, matching or employee-nominated giving at scale, you are effectively distributing funds to organisations you may know very little about. If one of them turns out to be fraudulent, defunct or sanctioned, the exposure is yours: financial, regulatory and reputational.

Employee-nominated giving makes this sharper. It is one of the best ways to drive participation, but it also means money can flow to charities your team has never vetted, chosen by well-meaning employees who did no due diligence of their own. Scale the participation without scaling the checks, and you scale the risk.

Due diligence is protection, not paperwork

The instinct is to treat charity vetting as administrative overhead, a box ticked once at onboarding. That is exactly how the risk gets in.

Good due diligence has three features:

1. It is proportionate. Lighter checks for well-known, established partners, heavier checks for unfamiliar or higher-risk applicants. You do not treat a national institution the same as a brand-new local group.
2. It is consistent across borders. If you give in multiple countries, the same standard has to travel with the money, through different registration systems, tax rules and sanctions regimes.
3. It is continuous. A charity that was sound last year may not be this year. Vetting once and forgetting is not vetting. The strongest programmes re-check.

Building the checks into the flow

The reason due diligence often gets skipped is that it feels like it slows giving down. It does not have to. The best-run programmes make vetting invisible by building it into the giving flow itself:

• Give from a database of pre-vetted charities, so employees can only give to organisations that have already passed proper checks.
• Own the payment flow end to end, so the money is controlled and traceable from source to charity, rather than handed off and hoped for.
• Monitor continuously in the background, so a change in a charity's standing is caught early, not at the next audit.

Done that way, due diligence stops being the thing that slows giving down and becomes the thing that lets you scale it safely.

The takeaway for risk and finance

You would not send corporate funds to an unknown supplier without checks. Charitable payments deserve the same discipline, and in a sector losing £1.65bn a year to fraud, they need it more, not less. Built-in, proportionate, continuous due diligence is what lets a company grow its giving and its participation without growing its exposure. It is not a brake on generosity. It is what makes generosity safe to scale.

---

Want the full picture? Our research report, The State of Corporate Giving 2026, covers trust and due diligence alongside the participation, matching and measurement challenges every giving programme faces, and how the best companies handle all of them at once. Download it here.