3.4.1.2 The community purpose of the CIC

Any CIC is required to set community benefit objectives in its constitutional documents, i.e. its memorandum and/or AoA. The CIC constitutional documents are reviewed by the Regulator (hereafter ‘the Regulator’) through a legislatively prescribed test known as the ‘community interest test’ (hereafter ‘the CIC test’). The Regulator was introduced in the UK Company Act of 2004 together with the introduction of the CIC legal form. The Regulator is the competent monitoring and adjudicating authority to decide whether the company meets the CIC test on a continuous basis through the review of submitted documents, i.e. constitutional documents, annual accounts and annual CIC reports.1 The standard for the Regulator to decide if a CIC meets the CIC test is whether a reasonable person would consider the activities carried out by the CIC for fulfilling the company’s objectives to benefitting the community.2