THE ADOPTION OF DOCUMENT RETENTION POLICY IN NON PROFIT ORGANIZATIONS

Leonard Branson
Mark Buxton
Megan Canny
University of Illinois Springfield
ABSTRACT
In response to the accounting scandals in the United States, Congress passed the Sarbanes-
Oxley (SOX) Act of 2002. In an attempt to cover up their fraud, employees of Enron destroyed many
documents that would have provided evidence of the full extent of the fraud. One of the provisions
of SOX related to document retention by companies. One of the questions that came out of SOX was
whether nonprofit organizations needed to abide by the same accounting regulations. Over the past
few years, more and more nonprofit organizations have adopted practices to be in conformity with
SOX Act. The objective of this study was to determine whether certain factors influence the adoption
of a written document retention and destruction policy by nonprofit organizations. The results of
this study suggest that only organizational size as measured by total revenue has a significant effect
on whether a nonprofit organization adopts a document retention policy.