As we recently noted, 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.
There are many differences. Sometimes it is one name has an “Inc.” versus no “Inc.”. Or a hyphen versus no hyphen. Sometimes the one of the names has the full English/French name, whereas the other is only the English or French Name.
Often, an organization has one entity but many branches, so the legal name of a large number of groups are identical because it is only one entity, but the account name is the particular locality of that branch.
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.
Here is the link for CRA to change your legal name.
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.
Here is a list of some of the charities that have a very different legal name vs. account name:
Legal names vs account names at CRA for charities