Features of Accounting for Political Parties: The Membership Fees Accounting

Political parties provide connection between the authorities and society, creating conditions for the implementation of the will of citizens and their influence on the authorities' decisions. The properly organized accounting for political parties is the effective tool for ensuring transparency of their activities, accountability to society and creating conditions for effective supervision by public authorities. The purpose of the article is to improve the methods of membership fees accounting as a weighty component of financing of political parties, taking into account the specifics of this category of non-budgetary non-profit organizations. The factors which influence on the organization of the accounting for political parties were disclosed. They are: the existence of membership fees and voluntary donations as the most significant component of financing political parties' activities; the publicity of political parties reporting; the political parties participation in legal relationships (with suppliers, employees, representative offices, etc.); the possibility of creating own media; the significant amount of printing products (socio-political literature, propaganda materials, etc.); the election campaign as a separate project in the activities of the political party. Based on the study of the existing methods of membership fees accounting, two models have been identified: with the use of accounts of the targeted financing and with the use of accounts of the incomes for the reporting period. The separation of the regular and supplementary membership fees allow to clearly classify the first as non-earmarked, and the latter as target financing. The correspondence of accounts for the membership fees accounting was generalized according to the following stages of their movement: accrual, receipt, return, redistribution, write-offs. The nomenclature of analytical accounts for the received membership fees was proposed, taking into account the territorial structure of the political party.