The previous Accountability Standards were first introduced in 1998 by the Charities Review Council and have helped strengthen the nonprofit sector and mobilize informed donors for over a decade.

At the end of 2009, the Council adopted a new set of Accountability Standards that reflected some of the economic, demographic, legal, and societal changes that affected the nonprofit sector over the last decade.  In April 2010, the Council began applying the new set of Accountability Standards to charity reviews. 

Both the new and the previous sets of Accountability Standards focus on the reasonable expectations of accountable and transparent nonprofits and at the core, mirror each other closely.