공익법인의 재무적 특성에 관한 연구

The present study examines the characteristics of financial statements of nonprofit corporations in Korea. First, the information required by the resource providers, the most important information users of nonprofit organizations, and problems of existing accounting standards for nonprofit organizations are discussed. Although there needs to be specific accounting standards depending on the types of nonprofit organization, currently there is no uniform accounting standards that allow the comparability of accounting information among nonprofit organizations. Therefore, it is necessary to establish a uniform accounting standards that can be applied to each nonprofit organization. Next, the results regarding the properties of accounting measures in previous literature are reviewed and the characteristics of accounting measures are analyzed using Korean nonprofit corporations’ financial statements. The investments ratio of nonprofit corporations turns out to be significantly higher than that of profit and listed companies, representing the characteristic of asset structure of nonprofit corporations. Meanwhile, the debt ratio of nonprofit corporations is significantly lower than that of profit and listed companies, demonstrating the typical characteristic of capital structure of nonprofit corporations. Especially, the program expense ratio is extremely high, representing that a large part of the total cost is related with the inherent purposes of nonprofit corporations, which illustrates well the characteristic of profit and loss structure of nonprofit corporations.