Michael Gebauer, Friederike Wall

An Economic Consideration on Apprehensions about Human Resource Accounting

23 Seiten · 4,37 EUR
(November 2006)

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Introduction:

During the recent past, the growing importance of the service sector and the so-called “New Economy” have shown that employees and humans related to an organization are the most important factor for corporations. Unfortunately, recent accounting systems are not prepared to reveal the importance, or even the “value” of the human resources of an organization.

Apart from severe technical problems in measurement and evaluation another substantial complex of questions is linked with accounting on human resources which can be termed as moral apprehensions. The reason for many old fashioned ways of accounting is that humans in a non-slavery community, that we have luckily past many years ago, cannot be treated like bricks and mortar. Many organizations and authors cast doubt about the need for accounting as collecting information about employees. The foresight of the transparent employee leads to the apprehension that information holders will use it just for their own advantage.

However, in the 60's and 70's different concepts already dealt with the measurement of the value of the personnel resources (human resources, hu-man assets). These discussions grew silent due to problems with data acquisition and evaluation. However, in the beginning of the 90's, many scientists saw Human Resource Accounting (HRA) just becoming fashion. Meanwhile, the concepts were taken up again in the Anglo-American and Scandinavian areas. It seems that concepts of HRA lived to see a resurgence and the advancements to practicable models started up again. As a result of these concepts, many people that have a critical eye to the approaches of HRA discuss the moral side of the medal. Human and capital seem to be terms that cannot be used together. Accounting on the basis of human capital can be lead by thoughts of traditional accounting methods and humans could be treated just like other property. On the other hand a company’s preparing for the future means to get the best information basis possible in order to plan and forecast. Therefore, it seems to be inevitable to get a lot of information about the probably most important value of the organization – the employees work force.

In this paper we want to discuss the view of opponents of HRA in an economic analysis. We want to analyze whether the claimed “apprehensive” questions can be answered by benefits HRA provides. For this purpose we use a stakeholder approach: after shortly characterizing the main developments of HRA we take the perspectives of different enterprise’s stakeholders like managers, investors, employees, and trade unions as well as the government. From these different points of view we analyze the problems but also the benefits of HRA. Of course, it is desirable to come to a conclusion whether HRA is compatible with socially responsible management.