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Concept
Environmental full-cost accounting
Summary
Environmental full-cost accounting (EFCA) is a method of cost accounting that traces direct costs and allocates indirect costs by collecting and presenting information about the possible environmental, social and economical costs and benefits or advantages in short, about the "triple bottom line" for each proposed alternative. It is also known as true-cost accounting (TCA), but, as definitions for "true" and "full" are inherently subjective, experts consider both terms problematic.
Since costs and advantages are usually considered in terms of environmental, economic and social impacts, full or true cost efforts are collectively called the "triple bottom line". Many standards now exist in this area including Ecological Footprint, eco-labels, and the United Nations International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives approach to triple bottom line using the ecoBudget metric. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has several accredited standards useful in FCA or TCA including for greenhouse gases, the ISO 26000 series for corporate social responsibility coming in 2010, and the ISO 19011 standard for audits including all these.
Because of this evolution of terminology in the public sector use especially, the term full-cost accounting is now more commonly used in management accounting, e.g. infrastructure management and finance. Use of the terms FCA or TCA usually indicate relatively conservative extensions of current management practices, and incremental improvements to GAAP to deal with waste output or resource input.
These have the advantage of avoiding the more contentious questions of social cost.
Full-cost accounting embodies several key concepts that distinguish it from standard accounting techniques. The following list highlights the basic tenets of FCA.
Accounting for:
Costs rather than outlays (see explanation below);
Hidden costs and externalities;
Overhead and indirect costs;
Past and future outlays;
Costs according to lifecycle of the product.
Expenditure of cash to acquire or use a resource.
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