IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/accfor/v34y2010i3-4p196-210.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Transparent Costing: Has the emperor got clothes?

Author

Listed:
  • Janek Ratnatunga
  • Erwin Waldmann

Abstract

Transparent Costing (TC) is a framework for determining the full indirect costs and thereby the full costs (FC) of Australian Competitive Grant (ACG) research projects; with the objective of ensuring the full funding of these projects by the government, so that they could be sustained in the long-run, and preventing their cross-subsidisation from other revenue sources. If a university wishes to be fully funded for its AGC research projects, it is mandatory to undertake a TC exercise and allocate the indirect costs of research activities. It was found in this study that whilst the objectives of FC appear worthwhile, FC may not prevent the practice of cross subsidisation. Also whilst it was found that Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing (TDABC) is preferable to ABC in the TC modelling of ‘research only’ departments and institutes; both approaches do not provide accurate information in ‘teaching and research’ departments. In these departments more accurate estimations could be obtained from studying the workload allocation methods and conducting direct interviews of the staff undertaking research on ACG and other externally funded grants.

Suggested Citation

  • Janek Ratnatunga & Erwin Waldmann, 2010. "Transparent Costing: Has the emperor got clothes?," Accounting Forum, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 34(3-4), pages 196-210, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:accfor:v:34:y:2010:i:3-4:p:196-210
    DOI: 10.1016/j.accfor.2010.08.005
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1016/j.accfor.2010.08.005
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.accfor.2010.08.005?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Morteza BAGHERPOUR, 2015. "Risky Time Driven Activity Based Costing in a Medical Center: A Development, Implementation and Simulation based Optimization Approach," The Journal of Accounting and Management, Danubius University of Galati, issue 2, pages 47-61, August.
    2. Karl Schuhmacher & Michael Burkert, 2022. "Time Is Relative: How Framing of Time Estimation Affects the Accuracy of Cost Information," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 68(7), pages 5493-5513, July.
    3. Pashkevich, Natallia & von Schéele, Fabian & Haftor, Darek M., 2023. "Accounting for cognitive time in activity-based costing: A technology for the management of digital economy," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 186(PB).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:accfor:v:34:y:2010:i:3-4:p:196-210. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/racc .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.