Conflict of asset measurement from the Perspective of Nonprofit Museum Studies

• In Event: Similarities and differences in the measurement of assets between for-profit and not-for-profit organizations under the concept of comparability

Abstract

The idea that cultural heritage is a "common heritage of humanity" and the importance of its preservation are internationally recognized through initiatives by organizations such as UNESCO (Meskell, L. 2015). However, in practice, when it comes to the maintenance and preservation of cultural heritage, some form of accounting is necessary. In modern times, the legitimacy of these costs is always emphasized as an accountability responsibility. As globalization in accounting progresses, organizations are expected to provide "general financial report" to external stakeholders and a logic seeking "comparability" to measure the "efficiency" and "effectiveness" of performance between organizations has become widespread (JICPA, 2015; 2019; 2022; IFR4NPO 2023). In other words, cultural heritage becomes a subject of globalization in accounting from the moment it is preserved and stored in a museum.
Essentially, within the context of a museum, cultural assets intersect with two different vectors of globalization: the value of preservation and the accounting value. This study aims to reveal the temporal evolution of accounting information when cultural assets become the property of museums using field research methods.
As a result, the following findings emerged: When a historical artifact is discovered and donated to a museum, it becomes the property of the museum. At that point, from an accounting perspective, a value must be assigned to the collection　at the moment. However, whether the group of artifacts is to be kept as individual items or multiple items must be determined by curators. Each item must be given a name, and there are rules for naming them. Additionally, determining the era and the place of discovery can take several months or even years to include academic information. Collections without this information are essentially worthless.
In other words, to give meaning to the museum's collection from the moment it becomes the museum's property, a "provisional period" is introduced. Let's call this the "first gray zone period." Only then will accounting information be added. This period is referred to as the "second gray zone period." It became evident that there are almost no unified criteria for measurement. Furthermore, many items cannot have a price assigned to them, so the surveyed museums have introduced “memorandum values”. In Japan, 1 yen is commonly used. When “memorandum values” are introduced, the pursuit of comparability is abandoned.
On the other hand, there are times when the evaluation of assets is required for certain collections. This happens when calculating the insurance amount when lending items to other museums or when determining the donation amount for donors to receive tax benefits. However, these are used for specific purposes, and "generality" is denied. In other words, museums consider measuring the value of cultural assets not as a general purpose but as necessary only for specific purposes.

Author

• Masayuki Deguchi, National Museum of Ethnology & Graduate University for Advanced studies