Report of the Committee on Accounting for Human Resources.

Abstract The article presents the text of the 1972-73 report of the American Accounting Association Committee on human resource accounting. Much of the early work on accounting for human resources focused primarily on getting measurements of human resources into reports used by managers and investors. In retrospect, this emphasis appears narrow and naive. Accounting for human resources is better viewed as a part of the processes for managing people in organizations. Potentially it may provide frameworks for human resource management paradigms. The goal is not merely to account but to improve the way people contribute to organizations, society, and economic well being. There are reasons to argue that human resources are fundamentally different from other resources. People are the means by which other resources are given utility; they provide the ideas, concepts, and constructs to coordinate financial and physical resources. People are both the means by which these other resources become products and the consumers of the products themselves.