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This study aims to examine whether and how voluntary accounting disclosures can repair individual donors’ trust in a charity after negative events.

The authors adopt a qualitative research approach and conduct 32 semi-structured interviews with active Australian individual donors, with a hypothetical vignette design. Hypothetical negative events and corresponding accounting disclosures are presented to participants during interviews.

Three types of individual donors are identified based on their decision-making patterns after negative events and primary trust relations with a charity-reasoned donor (giving-decision based on their analysis of the situation, competence-based trust), generalist donors (giving-decision based on trust in the charitable sector, institution-based trust) and emotional donors (giving-decision based on feelings and emotions about the charity, integrity-based trust). The research suggests that accounting disclosures can repair trust damage for reasoned donors and support institution-based trust for generalist donors, but do not seem able to repair trust damage for emotional donors and can potentially damage trust further.

Overall, the findings suggest that a one-size-fits-all approach to communicating with individual donors after negative events is not likely to be very effective in repairing trust. Instead, charities may need to adapt disclosures to their different types of individual donors.

While prior accounting studies have largely focussed on how charity managers themselves grapple with accountability or how negative events impact charitable donations, the authors demonstrate how accounting disclosures can play different roles in the trust-repairing process for different types of individual donors.

This paper seeks to explore the way charity accountants understand, interpret and legitimate or delegitimate the introduction of accounting and reporting changes (embedded in the extant charity statement of recommended practice), before these are actually implemented.

Drawing on 21 semi-structured interviews with accountants in large UK and Republic of Ireland charities, the manner and extent to which forthcoming changes in charity accounting are legitimated (justified) or delegitimated (criticised) is explored.

Acceptance of accounting changes in the charity sector by formal regulation may not be necessary for future required adjustments to practice to be legitimated. Using interviews carried out before the implementation of required changes, the results suggest that other factors, such as national culture, identity and mimetic behaviours, may play a major role in the homogenisation and acceptance of accounting and reporting rules. In particular, it is argued that mimetic pressures can be much more influential than regulative pressures in legitimating change in the charity sector and are more likely to lead to the embedding of change.

The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, it explores rhetoric and legitimation strategies used before changes are actually implemented. Second, it contributes to filling a gap in charities’ research related to intra-organisational legitimation of managerial and accounting changes, illustrating institutional-field identity at work to preserve shared organisational values and ideas. Finally, the research illuminates the importance of particular contextual pressures and individual legitimation arguments during accounting-change processes.

This paper aims to investigate the extent to which accounting standards for social impact reporting are in the public interest. This study aims to explore what the public interest means for social impact reporting by charities; and assess the extent to which the accounting standardisation of social impact reporting supports the public interest so defined.

This study conducts a case study of how stakeholders in Australian charities conceptualise the public interest when discussing accounting standardisation. This paper distinguishes three concepts of the public interest from prior research, namely, aggregative, processual and common good. For each, this paper analyses the implications for accounting and how accountants serve the public interest, and how they align with stakeholder views.

Stakeholder views align with the aggregative and processual concepts of public interest, however this was contested and partial. Accounting standards for social impact reporting will only serve the public interest if they also capture and implement the common good approach.

Clarifying how key stakeholders interpret the public interest can help standard-setters and governments design (or withhold) accounting standards on social impact reporting. This paper also distinguishes different practical roles for accountants in this domain – information merchants, umpires or advocates, which each public interest concept implies.

This paper extends prior research on accounting for the public interest to social impact reporting. The paper empirically demonstrates the salience of the common good concept of public interest and demonstrates the diversity of views on the standardisation of social impact reporting by charities.

We outline the history of a distinct accounting standard for charities. It charts the development of the first charity SORP and its subsequent failure. The paper explains the development of the current second charity SORP, and reviews three philosophical schools of accounting ‐ positivism, interpretive and critical. We critique how each perspective would define the SORP’s development. We conclude that all three philosophies provide a context which validates the purpose of the new charity accounting statement and subsequent regulation. The interpretative school, however, provides fusion between theory and current professional practice.

The purpose of this paper is to examine charity regulatory systems, including accounting standard setting, across five jurisdictions in varying stages of adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards, and identifies the challenges of this process.

Using a regulatory space approach, this paper relies on publicly available archival evidence from charity regulators and accounting standard setters in five common‐law jurisdictions in advanced capitalist economies, all with vibrant charity sectors: the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The study reveals the importance of co‐operative interdependence and dialogue between charity regulators and accounting standard setters, indicating that jurisdictions with such inter‐relationships will better manage the transition to IFRS. It also highlights the need for those jurisdictions with not‐for‐profit or charity‐specific accounting standards to re‐configure those provisions as IFRSs are adopted.

The study is limited to five jurisdictions, concentrating specifically on key charity regulators and accounting standard setters. Future research could widen the scope to other jurisdictions, or track changes in the jurisdictions longitudinally.

This paper provides a timely international perspective of charity regulation and accounting developments for regulators, accounting standard setters and charities, specifically of regulatory responses to IFRS adoption.

The paper contributes fresh insights into the dynamics of charity accounting regulation in an international context by using regulatory space as an organising framework. While accounting regulation literature provides a rich interpretation of regulatory issues within the accounting arena, little attention has been paid to charity accounting regulation.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of accounting in shaping charities' financial resilience during the COVID-19 crisis.

A case study of a charity was conducted. The financial resilience framework (Barbera et al., 2017) was applied to explore how accounting contributes to charities' capacity to cope with crises.

The results show how the accounting practices of budgeting, forecasting and performance reporting (financial and nonfinancial), as well as “accounting talk,” form part of the anticipatory and coping capacities that provided the charity the financial resilience to navigate the COVID-19 crisis.

The paper evidences the important role accounting plays in establishing financial resilience to help charities cope with crises, particularly the importance of having accounting practices established prior to a crisis and accounting information forming part of managers' discussions. The study also demonstrates that financial reserves have an important buffering capacity role.

This is the first paper to examine the role of accounting within a charity during an economic crisis. The authors explore the role of accounting in shaping a charity's financial resilience and demonstrate the applicability of the financial resilience framework to a sudden, unexpected crisis such as COVID-19. They extend the accounting talk literature by highlighting its importance to a charity and during a crisis.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how trustees of small English registered charities understand and own the reporting and accounting requirements with which their charities must comply.

The research described is a multi-pronged qualitative and inductive study of three small Yorkshire charities as they approve their annual accounts. The case studies are based on observations of trustee meetings and interviews with a range of trustees and their independent examiner or auditor. The use of a practice lens focuses on the behaviours of individuals to understand the sense that they make of their charity’s accounts.

Trustees' understanding of their financial statements is limited; they tend to rely on key individuals who have knowledge. Group responsibility creates a shared way of understanding the financial statements. Treasurers and independent examiners simplify information for the trustees even resorting to corner cutting and rule bending. Narrative reporting is given very little attention. Trustees read their financial statements as a report to them not by them; accountability notwithstanding, thus ownership of their financial statements is conferred not intrinsic.

The findings are drawn from three specific case studies and therefore cannot be generalised, but they offer rich qualitative insights into small charities’ accounting and reporting.

This research provides a unique multi-viewpoint analysis of charity practices, and through its use of a practice lens dives deeper into examining trustees’ understanding and behaviour.

This paper describes an empirical research study on the first year of compliance by a set of “major” UK charities with the Charity SORP that came into force in 1996 and replaced the previous SORP, which had been recommended since 1988. This new Charity SORP, unlike its predecessor is prescriptive and has the authority of the Charities (Accounts and Reports) Regulations 1995. From a sampling frame of top charities the accounts and financial statements of 125 major charities were selected for analysis (all of which were statutorily required to comply with the new SORP through the regulations). Additionally these top charities were selected as they were all subject to full professional audit, which should mean that the auditors would ensure compliance. Previous studies on charity accounts have recorded variations in accounting treatments. The new Charity SORP is mandatory for charities with an income of more than 250,000 and is designed to provide consistency in accounting by charities and a transparency to their affairs. The research found that there continues to be significant variation in the presentation of charity accounts and questions recent published research that claims significant improvements. The research also found that auditors, including those with charity expertise were failing in either advising or ensuring that charities complied with the SORP.

Charities are becoming recognised as playing an important part in communities by furthering government's social objectives through increasing support to disadvantaged members of society. As charities multiply in number, it becomes increasingly difficult for fund providers and contributors to determine which charity to support. In New Zealand there is a move towards providing public access to the financial accounts of charities to assist stakeholders in their decision making and to enhance transparency in charities. However, this assumes that these financial accounts are understandable by all stakeholders. This paper aims to identify four problems that limit the way forward for financial reporting by New Zealand charities.

The first section of the paper comprises a review of the literature on charities' financial accounts with a particular focus on the four problems identified above. The paper then reports the results of eight interviews with charitable organisations, auditors and academics that have expertise in charity financial reporting, with a particular emphasis on the four identified problems.

There was agreement that unresolved, these four problems could limit the way forward in financial reporting by New Zealand charities. Some recommendations are proposed that suggest a way forward with regard to these problems, so that the users of the financial reports of charities may benefit.

Highlights a need for further research into these problems to identify the feasibility of the proposed recommendations.

The enactment of the Charities Act 2005 in New Zealand and its requirement to include financial accounts on a publicly available register has raised the profile of the financial reports of charities. However, there has been limited research into the financial reporting by New Zealand charities, so this paper is a timely evaluation of four specific problems that could limit the way forward of financial reporting by New Zealand charities.

This study investigates non-government organisations' (NGO) current accounting and reporting practices in a developing economy context (Mauritius) and argues the case for reforms to enhance their transparency and accountability.

A content analysis of a sample of NGO annual returns was carried out followed by interviews with NGO officers and actors on the state of accounting and reporting practices in Mauritius. The authors analyse the data from a public accountability perspective.

The content analysis revealed poor accounting and reporting practices by Mauritian NGOs. Based on interview insights, the authors find that these poor practices arise due a lack of (1) NGO-specific accounting standards, (2) engagement with narrative reporting, (3) properly trained NGO officers and (4) proper monitoring and control. Some of the interviewees expressed their support for introducing online filing systems and accounting requirements that are commensurate with NGO size, improving regulatory oversight, while ensuring that NGO accounts are made available to the public.

While there are many calls for better NGO accountability and transparency in developing economies, little is known about the state of accounting and reporting mechanisms (and regulatory framework thereof) that could provide the basis for relevant reforms towards enhancing accountability. Considering the opacity of NGO information in Mauritius and recent concerns about money laundering practices and the perceived ineffectiveness of regulatory oversight, this first national assessment of accounting and reporting practices sheds light on current challenges and formulates locally appropriate recommendations for the sector.