Northern Ireland Charity Register Change Signals

This is a change-intelligence Actor, not a Northern Ireland charity directory or a replacement for the official CCNI Register.

It downloads the complete live CSV export from the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland, validates and privacy-minimizes the data, compares it with the last successful full snapshot, and emits one Dataset item per meaningful organisation-level change. The OpenDataNI catalogue records CCNI as publisher, a daily cadence and the UK Open Government Licence; it is used only as catalogue/licence evidence, never as the production data mirror.

Signals

• NEW_CHARITY_REGISTERED: a six-digit registration number newly appears and is not Removed.
• CHARITY_REMOVED: the same registration number changes explicitly to Removed in the current official export. Disappearance alone is never removal evidence.
• CHARITY_NAME_CHANGED, COMPANY_NUMBER_CHANGED.
• REPORTING_STATUS_CHANGED: transitions among REGISTERED, RECEIVED_ON_TIME, RECEIVED_LATE, OVERDUE, and REMOVED. Daily overdue/late day-count drift is discarded.
• INCOME_CHANGED, EXPENDITURE_CHANGED: observational comparisons of the latest reported totals, with both financial-period ends and amounts.
• CLASSIFICATION_CHANGED: set changes across what the charity does, whom it helps, and how it works; order-only changes are ignored.

Reg charity number is retained as a six-digit string and is the stable entity identity. Company-number 0 is treated as missing. No annual-return signal is inferred because the live export has no receipt-date field that provides a stable filing identity.

Running

Use {"mode":"sample","maxItems":30} for a deterministic, non-empty demonstration. Sample mode performs no HTTP, never opens the production named key-value store, passes fixtures through the production normalization/diff/filter path, and reports snapshotUpdated: false.

Live mode fetches the official CSV. The first successful run writes a full baseline, emits zero signals, and reports BASELINE_INITIALIZED. Identical canonical state is a normal zero-signal success. maxItems and all filters affect Dataset output only, never the stored snapshot. Supported filters include signal types, charity numbers, reporting statuses and classifications, with absolute/percentage thresholds for income and expenditure.

Processing is fetch → validate → privacy projection → normalize → stable-key/count checks → previous snapshot → diff → Dataset → OUTPUT → compressed snapshot commit. The commit is last, so source, Dataset or summary failures retain the previous good snapshot. Guards reject non-CSV/HTML responses, unexpected redirects, missing columns, small files, fewer than 7,000 entities, insufficient Removed coverage, conflicting identities, major count collapse and implausible mass disappearance.

Source, licence, privacy and limitations

Source: CCNI official charity search and live CSV export. Catalogue/licence evidence: OpenDataNI Register of Charities. Contains public sector information licensed under the UK Open Government Licence. The stated catalogue cadence is daily, but fetchedAt is an observation timestamp—not an official extract date when the response supplies no Last-Modified or ETag.

The snapshot and outputs exclude public address, website, email, telephone, trustees, named contacts, individual details, raw rows and account documents. They retain only organisation-level regulatory, classification and financial fields needed for comparison.

Finance values are source observations, not audited conclusions or advice. A financial-period shift may naturally change the latest totals; the output includes period context. CCNI cautions that some detailed zero-valued financial fields can reflect disclosure requirements rather than an economic zero, so this Actor compares only Total income and Total spending and excludes detailed/constant-zero fields. Source corrections can generate signals. Scheduling daily is reasonable, but publication timing is controlled by CCNI.