Paper Title
Analysis of Equality of Principal Accounting Terminology in Croatian Normative Framework
Abstract
The history of accounting profession in the Republic of Croatia reaches the beginning of the 90-ies of the last
century. There have been a lot of changes in the Croatian accounting normative framework from the establishment of Croatia
till nowadays. Those changes have been influenced and caused by many factors. Worldwide globalization processes haven't
passed around the field of accounting, so correspondingly the harmonization processes of accounting have marked the
accounting system in Croatia as well. Further, the International Financial Reporting Standards, as a globally accepted set of
standards, have had the strong influence on the Croatian accounting regulation. Croatian joining the European Union and the
alignment with the EU acqui communitare, such as accounting regulation and directives, have had an important impact on the
accounting legal regulation in Croatia. Apart from the standardization of accounting language, there are some disadvantages
of accepting the international accounting terminology. Finally, the specifics of Croatian accounting profession, the different
setters of accounting framework and often changes of the acts have caused the diversity in accounting terminology used in
passing several laws and accompanying rules regarding accounting. Taking into account all these features, the main goal of the
research is to perform the analysis of similarities and differences in the actual accounting normative framework in order to find
out the most common used accounting terminology. In that context, the legal acts such as the Accounting Act, the Companies
Act, acts regarding taxes and other related acts are explored. The corresponding vocabulary among the selected corpus is
searched and the list of main accounting categories is formed. Further, authors perform the test of frequency in the interest of
categorical discovery. The focus is given on principal accounting categories necessary to enact accounting rules. The research
methodology includes the selection of the most significant elements of accounting normative framework that will be
investigated during the research, making and processing the corpus of written texts and providing the frequency analysis of
main accounting categories in the corpus. The results from the research can be expected in the form of the identified frequency
of main accounting categories, the determined level of diversity in the used terminology with detected most common
synonyms. It is expected that these results can help to improve the accounting scientific and professional literature and
accounting normative framework in the Republic of Croatia.
Index Terms: accounting corpus, accounting normative framework, Croatia, terminology