The authors call it "concerning", for example, that one in five of "Canada's top 100 charities" refused to release their full audited financial statements to Ci.
[6] In 2015 the United Kingdom government announced the creation of a new government-run watchdog to regulate large charities.
[8] The next year, Karnofsky and Hassenfeld formed GiveWell as a nonprofit to provide financial analyst services to donors.
[8][9] They eventually decided to rate charities based on the metric of how much money it cost to save a life.
[8][12] In the first year, Karnofsky and Hassenfeld advocated that charities should generally spend more money on overhead, so that they could pay for staff and record keeping to track how effective their efforts were.
[13][14] It has argued that the variance in cost-effectiveness of charities arises largely due to the variance in the nature of the causes that the charities operate in, and therefore has made evaluations across broad areas of work such as health, education, and emergency aid before comparing specific organizations.
Charity Navigator's former CEO Ken Berger and consultant Robert M. Penna harshly criticized the idea of discriminating among cause areas for being moralistic and elitist "by weighing causes and beneficiaries against one another".