The Nonprofit Regulatory Space Race : The process of developing a global nonprofit accounting framework: A topic modeling approach

Sammanfattning

Background: Non-profit organizations (NPOs) deliver vital social and humanitarian services worldwide, yet over 90% of countries lack a dedicated financial reporting standard for the sector. In October 2025, the International Non-Profit Accounting Standard (INPAS) was released as the first globally dedicated NPO accounting framework. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to understand the development process of INPAS by examining which actors occupied the regulatory space, which topics were discussed within the space, and how the standard setter mediated between the different actors. Method: Drawing on recent advances in computational linguistics, 161 public comment letters across three Exposure Drafts and the corresponding Bases for Conclusions are analyzed using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Jensen–Shannon divergence is further employed to measure distance between actors and benchmark INPRF against a theoretically neutral broker, thus operationalizing regulatory brokerage into a replicable empirical measure of influence. Conclusion: Professional accounting actors accounted for over 62% of respondents, while NPO participation declined sharply with rising technical density and beneficiaries were entirely absent. Donors, though often thought of as the most powerful actor, were marginal in participation and enjoyed moderate influence. INPRF systematically departed from the neutral broker and aligned with accounting professionals while diverging most from the interests of the NPOs it regulates. Accountability functioned as an ambiguous object, whose meaning was shaped by technical framing, encoding a donor-centric upward accountability bias into the world's first global nonprofit accounting standard.