LASU Journal of Employment Relations and Human Resource Management
(LJERHRM)
ISSN: 2705-3482
Volume 1, No. 1, December 2018
Pages 131-139
DOI: 10.36108/ljerhrm/8102.01.0151
ACHIEVING A CONCENSUS ON HUMAN RESOURCES ACCOUNTING: A REVIEW OF LITERATURE
INUA, Ofe Iwiyisi (Ph.D)
Department of Financial Studies, Faculty of Management Sciences, National Open University of Nigeria
oinua@noun.edu.ng/ofejobs@yahoo.com
Abstract
This paper is a theoretical discourse and review on human resource accounting which remains an issue both for research and in practice. The library-based research design was used in this study. It is an established fact that the human resource is an integral component of every business and constitutes a key intangible asset for companies. However, unlike other assets, human resource does not conform to the peculiar patterns of conventional accounting assets in a strict sense and hence cannot be treated as such. Research efforts and models such as the replacement cost, opportunity cost, present value of discounted future earnings, etc have evolved overtime to try to properly capture, measure and report human resource and each model has its own weakness that makes it daunting for human resource to be fully amenable to the postulations of the models. Many researchers have thus shifted to issues of human resource disclosures in annual reports which basically concerns itself to what is disclosed about human resources such as training, welfare, compensation packages amongst others. This again does not provide much insight to the core issue of human resource accounting which involves cost to recruit, select, hire, train, compensate and develop human assets on one hand and calculating the economic value of people to the organization on the other. The study concludes that there is need for more robust research efforts and quantification methodologies for human resource accounting and the role of financial reporting standards will be crucial in helping to achieve some sort of consensus in moving forward on this issue of human resource accounting.
Keywords: Human resource accounting, Human resource valuation models.