Carnegie and West (Reprinted from CARNEGIE, G.D. & WEST, B.P., 2005, ‘Making Accounting Accountable in the Public Sector’, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, vol. 16, p 910, with permission from Elsevier.) state:

The consequences of the weak definitional basis for the monetary valuation of collections are often compounded by difficulties, sometimes of a particularly perplexing nature, in assigning money values to collection items and determining appropriate depreciation policies. There are frequently no markets for these items as their unique character often means that they do not belong to any generic category of commodities necessary for a market to be constituted: ‘like all museum artefacts, each one has an immensely personal story’ (Heinrich, 2002, p. 1; see also Carman et al., 1999). Such ‘stories’ contribute substantially to the uniqueness of particular artefacts and their non-financial values, and may also
precipitate legal measures designed to protect such items in a special domain beyond the economics of the marketplace. In other instances, only thin and sporadic markets for collection items exist. Money values assigned to collections and other non-financial resources are therefore typically arbitrary and unreliable (Carnegie and Wolnizer, 1995, pp. 43–44; Jaenicke and Glazer, 1991, p. 9).

REQUIRED

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