Nonprofits Outpace For-Profits in Accounting Errors

Nonprofit organizations make accounting errors at a relatively high rate, in part because they try to avoid devoting a high percentage of their funding to administrative costs, according to a new study.

The study, by Jeffrey Burks, associate professor of accountancy at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, noted that the rate of accounting errors at not-for-profits is nearly double that of for-profit businesses of similar sizes.

“Nonprofits of all sizes tend to have high error rates,” Burks said in a statement. “The rate of errors does vary with the size of the nonprofit’s audit firm. The clients of the largest eight audit firms in the country have a significantly lower rate of errors. The clients of these large audit firms tend to be large nonprofits, but the effect does not translate into a lower error rate for large nonprofits overall because so few nonprofits are audited by the top eight audit firms—only about 7 percent of my sample.”

Burks asked a team of undergraduate research assistants to download the audited financial statements of nonprofits and pore through them to identify cases when the nonprofit disclosed it was correcting an error.

Read the entire story on the Accounting Today website.