Book excerpt: The Charity Commission did not properly consider whether The Cup Trust met the key legal requirement of being within the jurisdiction of the High Court of England and Wales before registering it as a charity in 2009, and was slow in handling the case. Earlier this year, the Public Accounts Committee concluded that The Cup Trust had been set up as a tax avoidance scheme. The Cup Trust submitted claims for £46 million Gift Aid on £176 million of payments from participants to the scheme, but gave just £152,292 to charitable causes between April 2009 and March 2013. The Gift Aid claims have not been paid. The Charity Commission did not give sufficient consideration to issues which might have enabled it to open a statutory inquiry into the Cup Trust in March 2011, and that it was slow to appreciate the potential impact of the case on public confidence in charities, which it has a statutory duty to increase. The Charity Commission did not take sufficient account of the scale and nature of the tax avoidance scheme in its case strategy, was narrowly focused on the legal position and paid insufficient attention to the wider issues of public detriment, which it would have been appropriate to pursue further.