The American’s Third Party Of Assessment Practices And Revelations Of The Charity And Enlightenment To China

With the rapid economic and social development in China, China’s charity is gradually recovering from the slow development of sixties and seventies, and has made considerable progress. The number of charitable organizations and charitable volume increased significantly. The number of participants, the amount of charitable donations is also showing growth momentum. On one hand, philanthropy thrive has made important contributions to reduce social conflicts and to narrow the gap between rich and poor in China. On the other hand, shortcomings and lack of charity-related legal system has also led to a series of charity scandal frequently. These scandals impair the social credibility of charitable organizations and are also a serious blow to the people’s enthusiasm for charitable donations. Faced with these circumstances, the state gradually improve and implement relevant laws and regulations concerning charitable institutions and at the same time, people also strongly appeal to the whole society to strengthen the external oversight of charities. In this context, professional third-party evaluation institutions inevitably assume great social importance. External oversight generally includes supervision, social supervision and public scrutiny of government and third-party assessment bodies, these three methods of supervision from three different angles and directions of charities conduct oversight. But compared with the particularity of "government oversight and non-professional supervision of general public, third-party supervision assumes features of independence, professionalism and impartiality in the supervision of charitable activity. These features that third-party supervision is supposed to have in philanthropic organizations are more mature in European countries, especially in modern American philanthropic organizations. Third party assessment methods, forms of assessment and evaluation of industry self-regulation have been developed into maturity in U.S. Due to the delayed development of modern philanthropic notion in China, the current assessment of the charitable organization is primarily composed of the charitable organization’s own evaluation report, the government assessment report, the assessment reports of university research institutes, and the main assessment report of another third party commissioned to do a project. With the development of philanthropic organizations, it is imperative to set up special third-party evaluation institutions to supervise the activities of charities. Firstly, the paper introduces the main mode of assessment of the United States and analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of each of these modes. And secondly, the paper assesses the situation in China for the development of third party, according to the US latest third-party assessment practice and inspiration combined with the development of the existing problems of third-party assessment in China, recommendations for further development of the third assessment of charitable organizations are offered in the paper.