Organisational Characteristics and Accountability in Protecting Risk Exposures in Non-Profit Organisations

Abstract

Non-Profit Organisations (NPOs) must rely on a variety of activities and resource providers to support their activities in achieving their goals. Thus, NPOs are accountable to various stakeholders that provide the funds and other resources. However, as NPOs are generally subjected to less stringent regulatory requirements, some NPOs are not acknowledging issues of accountability. Hence, the objective of this study is to examine the effect of organisational characteristics on the extent of accountability in NPOs. The organisational characteristics and the extent of accountability are obtained from the content analysis of annual reports of 224 societies registered with Registrar of Societies (ROS) for the financial period 2010. The level of accountability examined is based on two main components, transparency and compliance. Organisational characteristics used in this study consist of types of income received by NPOs, presence of auditor and size of NPOs. The overall results show that the level of accountability for NPOs in Malaysia is at a low level. Results show that only total income from generated funds and size of organisation has an effect on the level of accountability. Meanwhile, total income from charitable activities, total income from other income and the presence of auditor is insignificant to the level of accountability. This infers that lack of regulatory requirements or best practices with regards to accountability increases various risk exposures to NPOs including fraud risk. This is corroborated by the insignificant relationship between the presence of auditors and accountability, where auditors are generally more focused on compliance with mandatory requirements.

Keywords: Non-Profit Organisations, Accountability, Transparency, Compliance, Organisational Characteristics,   Risk