The Union Home Ministry has overhauled disclosure requirements under the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA), mandating that every organisation or individual seeking registration, prior permission or renewal must submit audited financial statements, audit reports and activity summaries for the past three financial years. .
Under the new Form FC-3A (fresh registration), applicants must enclose:
● audited balance-sheet, income-and-expenditure account and receipts-and-payments account for each of the last three years;
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● a chartered-accountant certificate giving activity-wise spending, where that information is missing from the audit reports;
● individual year-wise activity reports; and
● additional affidavits if the association publishes material covered by FCRA section 3(1)(g) or had an earlier FCRA licence that lapsed or was cancelled.
Parallel inserts in Form FC-3B (prior permission) now compel project applicants to produce a detailed project budget and a donor commitment letter, while certifying that administrative overheads will not exceed 20 % of the foreign grant. They must also file an undertaking to follow Financial Action Task Force (FATF) good-practice guidelines.
For entities seeking renewal (Form FC-3C), the amendment obliges submission of identical three-year audited data and bank statements tracing every rupee of foreign funds received after an earlier certificate expired.
If an NGO’s programme expenditure over the three-year window is below ₹15 lakh, it must file a special affidavit justifying capital investments, signalling the Ministry’s intent to discourage dormant or shell entities. The rules also embed new asset-tracking tables in the annual return (Form FC-4), compelling disclosure of all movable and immovable assets bought with foreign money, along with a chartered-accountant’s certified utilisation matrix that aligns receipts, spends and balances project-wise and location-wise.
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The latest amendment is designed to make due-diligence data available up front rather than after funds start flowing.
With the rules operative from 26 May, any application now pending on the FCRA online portal will have to be updated with the newly prescribed documents before scrutiny resumes.
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