From Reporting to Regulation: The Making and Governance of Financial Resilience Through the Charity Statement of Recommended Practice in England and Wales

This paper examines the emergence of the first charity accounting standard, the Statement of Recommended Practice 2: Accounting by Charities (SORP), to show how financial resilience came to be constructed within the sector. Moving beyond accounts which frame the SORP as a technical response to scandals of the 1980s, it situates its development within a longer trajectory of post-war welfare and regulatory reform. Drawing on Burchell et al.’s notion of arenas, the paper traces how the accounting profession helped connect concerns around poor financial reporting, fraud, financial mismanagement and weak regulatory oversight to the development of standardised reporting practices which made charities financially knowable, comparable and governable. By treating the SORP as a regulatory tool, the paper shows how accounting standards helped translated aspirations for stewardship into calculable and governable expectations of financial resilience.