The Reporting of Human Resource Accounting

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION 1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY Indeed, accountancy profession is a profession that encompasses other profession and that is why accounting has usually been thought of as highly technical field that can only be understood by the professionals (chartered accountants). Also, it has often been called ‘the language of business. Even, people in the business world owners, managers, banks, stockbrokers, investors, human resource managers, lawyers, to mention a few all uses accounting terms and concepts to describe their resources and the activity of every business they engage in whether large or small. While, according to the dictionary of management by Daniel Hartzell ‘Human Resource Accounting’ is defined as a concept that views the employees of an organization as capital assets like plant and equipment. It is important to say here that human resources accounting involves measuring the costs incurred by business organizations and other entities to recruit, train, develop and maintain their human capital. It also involves measuring the economic value of people to organization. These people consist of suppliers, customers and the society as a whole. It is not an overstatement to say that we are living in an era of accounting and as such human resources accounting must not be seen as an ordinary concept in the field of accounting but as a current trend that has come to stay. However, in this study, focus shall be placed on human resources accounting and how it will be reported in the financial statement, which also mean the capitalization of human resources as an asset which can be amortized. Although, the worth of human resources may be fairly difficult to quantify, hence there is no reason to value them at zero or not to record them in the financial statement as an asset. If the change in the value of money are accounted for, depreciation and maintenance of plants and machinery are also accounted for different adjustments are