Financial Accountability & Management最新文献

This article traverses the range of issues evoked by research relating public accountability and democracy. It conceptualizes these issues as being a mosaic that is ever-changing and has been growing significantly in size since the 1970s. That mosaic presents itself in this Special Issue as being accountability appearances on a stage that is viewed within a theatre of democracy. The articles published in this Special Issue are also introduced.

In this paper, we examine how Covid-19 was utilized by the management of a university as a catalyst for ideological change, with the objective of transforming the ethos of a university management school and the role(s) of the academics employed within. Through new modes of working that maintained corporeal distance between university staff, market-based ideology was mobilized to institute radical and lasting change within the roles of academics and operations of the institution. We focus on a singular case study: “Blue Management School” (BMS, pseudonym), based within an English mid-tier research university which has historically embraced corporatization more readily than most of its peers. We conducted a qualitative analysis of management email communications and from interviews with nine academics (both current and former employees) who were working at BMS during the time concerned (March 2020 onward). We observe that Covid-19 posed significant challenges to corporatized universities, and that university managers at BMS sought to address these challenges by undertaking further steps toward corporatization and mobilizing organizational change legitimized by the need to manage the Covid-19 situation. This included hierarchical forms of accountability, with academics answering for module content to teaching convenors and the management team (“manager academics”). We draw attention to how management communications carried profound effects for the mobilization of ideological change within the institution, during this period. In addition, academic identity was affected, moving away from traditional research and teaching scholars toward revenue-generating customer service workers, facilitating a power shift away from academics and further toward managers.

Hospitals in Norway are organized as trusts, required to follow the same accounting principles as the private sector, and responsible for funding their own investments. Thus, being able to run with a surplus has been an important part of their management. We analyze hospital budgeting for the whole sector over a 9-year period, looking at the size of the budget surplus, degree of optimism bias, and degree of budget accuracy when comparing to the actual financial results. Our findings indicate that on average, health trusts budget with a relatively small surplus. We find indications for optimism bias, but also examples of pessimism bias. Large health trusts seem to have a higher degree of accuracy of the budgeted results. Trusts that fail to meet budgeted results have a lower budgeted surplus the following period. Capital intensity, an indication of need for new investments, is not associated with budget surplus, degree of optimism, or budget accuracy.

This article argues that since 1979, in the UK, democratic accountability has been eroded—in spite of the far greater emphasis formally placed upon meeting the ideal of transparent workings of power. First, we look at structural reforms made to the government by Margaret Thatcher and how these led to an attenuation of ministerial accountability. Second, we consider how the increasing role of accountants and management consultants in formulating and delivering government policy subverts the ideal of a disinterested bureaucracy and results in a blurring of private (for-profit) and public interests.

This study focuses on the field of public audit as a collibrative element of public sector accountability. It reports on the consequences of substantial collibrative intervention in such a field. The intervention studied is the change to local authority audit in England that culminated in the Local Audit and Accountability Act, 2014, and entailed the abolition of the Audit Commission. Drawing on strategic action field theory, and through examination of submissions to the Redmond Review and other documentary materials, an analysis is developed of the field of public financial audit in its ongoing efforts to re-equilibriate following the intervention. The analysis explores the action taken in pursuit of the restoration of field stability, effective functioning, and legitimacy, and the effects on public accountability. The analysis supports Julia Black's contention that different accountability regimes are not readily substitutable and exposes some of the risks and difficulties associated with attempts to modify accountability through collibrative intervention.

Worldwide, open data initiatives aim at making information publicly available and transparent. Increasingly, local governments (LGs) are publishing financial statements in order to inform citizens, in their function as both service recipients and resource providers, about the LGs’ financial situation. However, it remains questionable as to whether LG financial statements are appropriate mechanisms of public accountability: it is debated, on the one hand, whether citizens are interested in accounting information, and on the other hand, if they are able to understand the information presented in financial statements. This study is the first of its kind applying the think aloud method to analyze citizens’ perceptions of LGs’ financial statements in a sample of 30 German citizens with diverse socio-demographic characteristics. The paper explores citizens’ general interest in accounting information and their ability to extract basic financial information from these statements so that increased transparency can be assumed. This explorative study reveals that although citizens demand transparency and financial information, they find it challenging to understand financial statements. Citizens seem to be overwhelmed by the information and call for delegation of the tasks or simplified reporting formats.

Achieving the United Nations (UN) sustainable development goals (SDGs) at country and local levels—and ensuring “no one is left behind”—requires that nation states commit to solving complex social and societal challenges through collaborative, democratic means. Technocratic and bureaucratic procedures alone are insufficient. In addition to satisfying international actors, governments must discharge integrated democratic accountability through inclusive stakeholder engagement with and between diverse and locally embedded social actors and institutions. Democratic accountability requires recognizing and preserving social complexity and plurality mediated through public dialogues between actors and institutions. Concurrently, global initiatives like the SDGs offer opportunities for the UN's member states to show their sincerity to international principles and standards while engaging with local practices that promote democratic means of resolution and policy implementation. This research analyzes how public sector audit can potentially support and hold a government accountable for its international pledges to SDGs, including stakeholder engagement. In India, the public sector auditor has proactively undertaken a performance audit on that government's “preparedness to implement SDGs.” This research demonstrates how the government is held accountable for its policies and actions on SDGs, through analyzing the interrelated actions of India's two key democratic institutions—the Supreme Audit Institution and Public Accounts Committee. We make recommendations for improving state accountability for SDGs through national level policies, mechanisms and processes of stakeholder engagement and dialogues. At an international level, we argue for the UN to develop more effective mechanisms to hold governments accountable for policies and progress on their SDG commitments. Such mechanisms could include regular progress and performance audits and monitoring both nationally and internationally. These could contribute to improved leadership and integrated policy-making across layers and levels within a nation state. We also highlight the areas for further research.

The aim of this paper is to investigate how politically based trade union power can determine the fate of a regulatory body's organizational reform and undermine public accountability in a purportedly democratic developing country (DC). A large regulatory organization in Bangladesh was examined as a case study to uncover how political actors and power were embedded in a World Bank (WB)-led organizational reform designed to contribute to public accountability and democracy. Interviews and media (newspaper) were utilized to identify the contestation of powers at macro- and micro-levels. The explanation of reform implementation was informed by New Institutional Theory and its derived concept of institutional logics. Finding that political recruitment of the organization's senior executives made it susceptible to the pressures of political agents, the study reveals how politically supported union actions interrupted a WB-led organizational reform that was seeking to secure democracy and public accountability. It finds that the pre-existing institutional arrangements resurfaced over time as the political agents secured more power to restore past practices that adversely impacted public accountability. The lack (absence) of accountability in a so-called democratic regime facilitated political interference with the regulatory governance and reforms that undermined organizational accountability to external stakeholders. The case-study organization's institutional environment, agents, and interests were unique situational conditioners that nonetheless may be relevant to other similar public accountability organizations in DCs. The findings of the paper have important implications for policymakers who design, implement, and evaluate public accountability reforms in DCs.

The public sector accounting harmonization process that started in the European Union in the aftermath of the financial crisis led the European Commission to launch a project for the development of a set of European Public Sector Accounting Standards (EPSAS). This paper analyses the process and the decision-making around development of the EPSAS through the lens of the garbage can model (Cohen, M. D., March, J. G., & Olsen, J. P. (1972). A garbage can model of organizational choice. Administrative Science Quarterly, 17(1), 1–25). More specifically, by identifying problems, participants, solutions, and choice opportunities, it discusses why the development of the EPSAS is taking so long and why the process does not seem to be progressing as planned. To this end, documents related to the process of EPSAS development are analyzed. The results provide evidence of problematic preferences and fluid participation possibly coupled with flight decisions—three elements of the garbage can model. Postponing decisions can be an option to dampen reluctance. The more the public sector becomes accustomed to the International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS) by adopting IPSAS-like accrual accounting standards while waiting for the completion of the EPSAS, the less resistance there might be to moving to accrual accounting standards. However, at the same time, an imminent change to a new set of EPSAS standards might become less plausible if changes demand extra reform.