A Study On Non-profit Foundation Information Disclosure Appraisal And The Governance

Non-profit foundations play a vital role in helping the vulnerable groups and the development of science, culture, education, health, and other public service activities. Their importance has been widely recognized by the society, more and more people have participated the positive activities of the foundations, and the activities of the foundation have thus received more attention. However, the opacity of the non-profit foundations for operation makes their stakeholders difficult to have access to their information and hard to carry out their supervision over it. Meanwhile, academic research in this area has the following characteristics: Researches on the information disclosure of profit foundations are much more than those on the information disclosure of non-profit foundations.Researches on the mode, motive and degree of information disclosure and on its governance structure are many while researches on the evaluation of information disclosure are few. Based on the above facts, this paper seeks to study the status, mechanisms, assessment system, and other aspects of information disclosure of the non-profit foundations.The principal-agent theory, the theory of asymmetric information, the theory of public goods on accounting information, non-profit ownership theory, and signaling theory provide a solid theoretical support for the information disclosure of the non-profit foundations. The information disclosed by China's non-profit foundations includes the basic situations of these non-profit foundations and their constitution, the annual work report, the information of the foundation-funded projects. The information disclosure of China's non-profit foundations has the following constraints: ignorance of the information on the users'need, high lost of the information disclosure, inadequate accounting theory, lack of competition and survival consciousness, and insufficiency of government's control. The methods of information disclosure of nonprofit foundations include the mandatory disclosure of information, the voluntary disclosure of information. The disclosure delivered by the management branches of government, the disclosure made by the industry association, the disclosure by the media, the disclosure by the foundations themselves, and the disclosure made by donors are the main ways of the information disclosure.This paper also describes the basic principles on the quality evaluation index system of information disclosure for non-profit foundations, its basic content and general framework. Based on the above information, this paper uses a self-established model to make an empirical analysis of the information disclosure quality of a big foundation; the result shows that its quality reaches a"medium"level.The perfection of mandatory responsibility of non-profit foundations for the information disclosure and the quality control of their information disclosure are two major measures to improve the quality of the information disclosure of the non-profit foundations. Nonprofit Foundation's mandatory responsibility for the information disclosure mainly means the information disclosure by the non-profit foundation's board; the disclosure by the government supervising department; the information disclosure by news media and industry associations. The quality control of information disclosure of non-profit foundations mainly covers the improvement of the legal system of information disclosure of non-profit foundations and the full establishment of auditing system and supervising system of information disclosure of non-profit foundations.