Accepting money on behalf of a club

[Babkb]

My husband is treasurer for a society. He is in the process of setting up a “clubs and societies” bank account, but it was taking too long so he has started accepting payments on behalf of the society to his personal bank account. He says he may receive as much as £10k. He also says he is not taking any risk because he won’t go overdrawn and money will always go in before it goes out. I worry that this is a financial risk, but don’t know how. Is this going to affect his credit rating? What other risks might there be?

I think the main risk is that he is leaving himself wide open to accusations of embezzlement!

He's at massive risk. Not only of cries of embezzlement but his bank account could be frozen with multiple small amounts going in because of money laundry regs. He's being very naive.

Yes, I wouldn't like this at all. He could be seen to be benefitting personally, even if it's only in terms of interest.

It will - it should - breaks the society's policies.

He needs to extricate himself from this mess as quickly as possible.

It may also be against the T&Cs of his account if it's considered business use and he only has a personal account.

Can he at least set up a Starling or other online account immediately the use that just for the club so it's all in one place? He can open online in minutes!

I'd be furious if I was paying money to a club and your husband was paying it straight into his bank account.

Sounds very dodgy!

He is being very, very stupid naïve to do this.

There is no way in a million years ANYONE should be putting a club or society's money through their own account, and that has to be seen as 100x stupider when it is such large amounts.

Hopefully he is tracking every

Hopefully he his tracking every Penny that goes in and out so he can cover himself against any accusations.

The main thing I’d be worried about is if it’s a lot going in and out at once then the bank may consider it to be suspicious activity and therefore do something that then may mean you can’t use it until they investigate - this may then put your personal finances at risk if, for example, your mortgage payment can’t then go out.

I’d also be worried about accusations of profiting from interest etc. No matter how minuscule, depending on the make up of the club there may be someone who objects to that benefiting your husband rather than the club.

His head needs a wobble. Perhaps a montage of the Father Ted clips about how the money was only resting in his account…

Terrible idea which demonstrates he doesn't have the necessary qualities to be treasurer.

He should be able to set up a PayPal account in the club name until the bank account is set up and have the money transferred there.
I did this with one of my club accounts as some people prefer to pay via PayPal.

He's leaving himself far too open to accusations of embezzlement by getting into his personal accounts.

All money transfers should be transparent transactions

Very naive to do this - he could set up a Monzo account in minutes and use that until the official account is sorted, he could do that very very easily today and use it immediately.

No, no, no, no, no.
Tell him to stop right now and open a separate account for the charity, for all the reasons described.

Intermingling money from your own business with personal money is poor practice. Absolute nightmare if you need to claim means tested benefit. Also, any properly constituted club will have arrangements to audit accounts.

As a minimum it should be a seperate account used solely for the club's cash. I've done this on a pretty small scale, hundreds of pounds for a reunion I was organising. I had a dormant instant access savings account and used that, tagging deposits and outgoings so that

Terrible idea which demonstrates he doesn't have the necessary qualities to be treasurer.

Exactly.
The fact he thinks it is okay to do this, shows he doesn't have the knowledge to do the role.

This is a terrible terrible idea. Does the club have any kind of higher authority or governing body? I'm the treasurer for our Brownie unit and this would be against our HQ finance policy and would result in a compliance event raised against me by HQ with all the associated potential disciplinaries etc / potentially being removed from the organisation.

You can open a Lloyds Treasurer account online for a club or society and it takes around a week i think for everything to be fully processed (or at least ours did)? He needs to get this sorted now and stop taking payments for the club in the meantime.