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The absence of accounting requirements in the Swedish non-profit sector and its impact on stakeholders

Recently, the Swedish media have highlighted several cases of misuse of grants by non-profit organizations. This attention gave rise to the idea for this thesis. Non-profit organizations have no economic interest and should instead aim to protect the interests oftheir members. They play an important role in civil society, which is why various authorities can award them grants to support their activities. However, it has been discovered that some organizations misuse the grants and use the money for completely different things than the stated purpose. In Sweden, there is no law regulating non-profit organizations. In terms of accounting, also, not all organizations meet the requirements to be covered by the Swedish accounting act. This means that for many non-profit organizations there are no accounting obligations. The aim of this thesis is therefore to examine how the absence of an accounting regulation affects different stakeholders and to assess the role of accounting requirements in addressing scandals in light of stakeholder thinking. Interviews were conducted with stakeholders such as various grant-giving authorities and reviewing authorities. The results show that the majority of them feel that they have been and are affected by this in some way. The main reason is that the authorities have not been able to carry out proper controls on the non-profit organizations because they have not received enough information. The fact that not all non-profit organizations are covered by the accounting act means that they do not prepare information that many stakeholders would consider important in the control process. This in turn increases the risk of failing to detect errors and frauds. To meet stakeholders' information needs and reduce the risk of frauds and scandals, more requirements need to be placed on the non-profit organizations.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:kau-100613
Date January 2024
CreatorsErlandsson, Sandra
PublisherKarlstads universitet, Handelshögskolan (from 2013)
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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