Human resource is among the most important resource an organization has yet it is the most neglected in terms of evaluation of its worth to the organization. The underlying reason for this neglect seems to lie partly in ambiguous corporate attitudes towards employees and partly in the perception that measuring human contribution and worth is difficult contentious and irrelevant. This article seeks to understand the issue by briefly tracing the history of HRA to analyze its two basic components i.e. Human Resource costs and Human Resource value. However the application of various HRA models are very problematic and theoretical at this point of time. Effective evaluation of a human resource if applied would help to safeguard the erosion of the potential economic value of HRA.

Human resources are regarded as the most valuable assets of an organization. The importance of human resources to business organizations can also be gleaned from the fact that companies today are investing more in human resources than the past. With the accent of business changing from manufacturing to providing services the dependence on the human resources as a means to achieve the end results has increased manifold. But paradoxically very little has been done to evaluate their worth to the organizations. Platitudes paradoxes and dogma seem to be the main obstacles to sensible objective measures of contribution of people to business.

Among the paradoxes are the ambiguous corporate attitudes towards employees the role played by Human Resource (HR) departments as guardians of the collective people resource and a dogmatic approach which finds measuring human contribution as difficult contentious and irrelevant to more immediate matters. Corporates in their anxiety to attain world-class standards of error-free performance program out opportunities for human contribution. While on the one hand managers are taught to regard people as resources providing long-term value on the other most of their performance measures and pay relate to achieving current year's volume and profitability.

The Accounting World Magazine, Human Resource Accounting, HRA, Human Asset Accounting, Human Resource Management, Management Strategies, Training Acquisition, Decision-Making Process, Business models, HRA Models, Organizational Goals, Training and Development Programmes.