Management Accounting Treatment

Capital asset accounting is more difficult when intangibles are considered, most notably in the managing of human capital. Because some theory of value creation must be used to assess the contribution of the different elements of human capital, this is considered a management accounting problem to which few fixed standards have so far been applied.
However, rampant speculation and potential for creative accounting and accounting scandal is involved when intangibles are a large part of a company's value. Most such recent US scandals involved high-tech companies during the dotcom boom that could represent their software, teams of engineers, and loyalty of their customers, rather arbitrarily since there was little to compare it to before the Internet era.
Breaking down the intangibles that go into human capital into the instructional capital followed to do things, the individual capital talent, and the social capital between them and the customers that allows them to trust each other and get things done, is an approach sometimes advised.
In sports economics and in public sector efforts at measuring well-being, and other specialized fields there is a need to try to gauge these intangibles for a group of people in a team or a whole society. This is a very difficult issue: