Most people search the CRA’s Charities Listing and see the name of the registered charity. That is actually the “Account Name” that is appearing on the Charities Listing. There is also a “Legal Name” that CRA has for every charity. For most charities, they are identical. However, sometimes they are not.
There are lots of charities that use a name publicly that is not identical to their legal name. In other cases, a charity requests a change of name, and CRA only makes the change in one of the two name fields. Not always clear why. If your charity is ever requesting a name change, ensure that it is clear to CRA that you want both the Account Name and Legal Name to be updated unless you don’t.
This is from the CRA database (only some of the fields show up on the Charities Listing). It is what CRA provides to the public that requests it.
As you can see, there is the legal name and the account name. CRA uses the “Account Name” in their Charities Listing. We use the “Legal name” on CharityData.ca. This is helpful as sometimes when you are looking for a charity on the CRA’s Charities Listing, you don’t find it on the CRA website, but you do find it on CharityData.ca.
As CharityData.ca searches both Legal Name and activities (which CRA does not and only searches Account Name) it is good to have in your activity description box the name of your charity. At the bottom of the CharityData.ca website for each charity page, there is a link to the CRA database so you can check if the charity is still a registered charity on the official CRA Charities Listing. The link is based on CRA business numbers and not names.
If you find that either the name on the Charities Listing or on CharityData.ca is not correct, then you need to contact CRA to change your “Account Name” or “Legal Name” if you want that reflected on the CRA’s database or at some point on CharityData.ca.
By the way, for those that are wondering, you probably should not use either the “Account Name” or “Legal Name” on the CRA Charities Listing for purposes of bequests or major gifts because one or the other or both may not be accurate. Corporate registries such as the CNCA listing from Corporations Canada are more accurate, but even those are not always 100% accurate, and it is best to actually review the most up-to-date governing documents.
Many groups would be quite surprised if they looked closely at their CRA file to see how out of date some things are. We often find that CRA has people listed who are authorized who have had nothing to do with the charity for decades, and often, the current CEO, CFO, COO, etc of the charity are not even on the CRA system as an authorized representative. It does not matter until you urgently need to speak to CRA, and they refuse to talk to you because you are not authorized on their system. To get authorized can sometimes take weeks, and needless to say, that can be very painful if the matter you want to discuss with them is urgent.