When Social Accounting becomes an obligation by Law. The case of Italian Social Enterprises

This paper examines the relevance of Social Accounting (SA) reporting for Entrepreneurial Third Sector Organisations (ETSO). It starts considering that, while for for-profit organisations, SA shows how a social responsible organisation, implements actions which explicitly, and especially voluntary, seek to serve a broader social purpose or lead to the betterment of society, for ETSOs the achievement, and consequent accountability, of social objectives is part of their reason of existence. In particular the paper analysed the case of Italian Social Enterprises, which represent the first case in which SA reporting is compulsory by law. We randomly selected 20 social reports from the compulsory national register of Italian SEs, and we run an analysis on eight different components giving appropriate scores. Although the run analysis is partial and a preliminary one, no far from bias (considering that the number of cases can be enlarged and especially the scoring and connections among factors can be better outlined) results clearly show that a compulsory requirement, not followed by any control, has the risk of becoming a simply fulfilment, thus weakening the potentials of SA schemes and not responding to the necessary disclosure of the peculiarities of an ETSO.