The difficulties and benefits of environmental cost accounting application

摘要

The research aims to explain the importance of environmental cost accounting through the difficulties and benefits of declaration of environmental costs in financial statements. To achieve this goal, 30 questionnaires, each one includes 15 questions, were distributed to Basra Municipality Department, 27 questionnaires were retrieved valid for statistical analysis. Percentages, iterations, arithmetic means and standard deviations were used for each question in the questionnaire. T test was also used to analyze the research hypothesis, the important conclusions were: There are benefits in the declaration of environmental costs accompanied by difficulties. There are no legislations or procedures that obligate a institution to declare the environmental costs. The important recommendations are the necessity of development of legislations and procedures that obligate economic or service institutions to declare the environmental costs in their financial statements. The holding of educational programs or courses that deal with environmental accounting to provide enough qualified staff who distinguish between financial and environmental costs.