Sammendrag
In recent years a vast number of financial reforms have been introduced in many countries to improve financial reporting and planning systems. In the public sector, many such reforms have been coined NPM and NPFM trends. Such change attempts have not escaped criticism. Especially, the use of the accrual principle in different ways has been highlighted as a challenging and problematic area. This is the topic of discussion in this paper. We investigate this by studying documents and observing meetings (i.e. annual OECD public sector accruals symposiums). By so doing, we identified the following overall themes of concern amongst accounting practitioners, relating to: Reform outcomes, unclear boundaries and limits of financial accounting, valuation, harmonizing (global vs. local view on accounting), challenging calculative areas, implementation/transition challenges, uncertain accounting user abilities/traits, information usefulness issues. In addition we found that Anglo-Saxon countries and international standard setters hold a dominant position. In the analysis we rely on a framework allowing us to analyze conflicting interest amongst accounting stakeholders. This illuminate why the use of the accrual principle in the public sector is challenging, but also offers some suggestions of how it could be tackled in future financial planning and reporting reform efforts.
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