Financial Accountability & Management最新文献

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.

In the last decades, public management and accounting scholars have focused increasingly on the study of interorganizational initiatives involving multiple public organizations in the pursuit of common goals. This paper is an investigation of management control in a public interorganizational program. It adopts a “management control as a package” approach with the aims of (i) identifying the control mechanisms used in interorganizational initiatives; (ii) exploring the interdependencies between them; and (iii) understanding the contribution of organizational controls in supporting collaborative actions. To address the research objectives, this paper presents the case study of a public initiative. The empirical research combines an interventionist approach with semistructured interviews. As a result, the research highlights that management controls in public interorganizational initiatives could require a package of multiple control mechanisms interdependent; moreover, controls at the inter and intraorganizational level influence each other to guide administrations toward the achievement of common objectives. In particular, in the case analyzed, interorganizational controls seem to support public organizations in overcoming the silo logic that often characterizes public administrations’ structure.

This study explores how managers and officials enable public value (PV) creation through accounting practices in higher education institutions (HEIs). Adopting a narrow perspective related to gender accounting, this paper presents a comparative case study of three HEIs based in Italy that have been implementing gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) in the last few years. Interviews are conducted with managers and officials involved in GRB processes. The results are analyzed on the basis of Moore's strategic triangle and the strategic alignment among its dimensions. Scarce integration within HEI strategies and low involvement of internal and external stakeholders in iterative processes for strategy definition are identified. Furthermore, the GRB is a standalone gender accounting practice and has limited capability of assessing gender equality outcomes. These results are among the main factors limiting the capability of HEIs to deliver PV through GRB.

When Indonesian village governments were granted authority, independence, and decentralized budget from the central government through Village Law No. 6 of 2014, most people predicted that it would not promote better village development. Instead, such a policy would increase corruption cases and subsequently persuade people not to trust the village government. It might interfere with the legitimacy of the village government's autonomy. Insufficient institutionalization of good governance in the village was one of the reasons. Hence, this study aims to examine the association between transparency after village governance reform—as one of the good governance principles—and village community trust intervened by corruption perception of villagers. This study employed a survey method and involved 128 village governments in the Special Region of Yogyakarta Province, Indonesia, as the samples. The Partial Least Square technique was used for hypothesis testing. This study discovered that transparency was positively associated with low corruption perception and high village community trust. Moreover, corruption perception from villagers was negatively associated with community trust and had a role as a partial intervening variable.

This paper maps 20 years of survey research on performance measurement (PM) practices in public sector organizations. Cumulative findings from the discipline of accounting enhance the understanding of public sector PM and its antecedents and effects. Four maps are presented that visualize the relationships among key variables from prior research in four empirical settings: government, health, education, and other domains. Furthermore, this review distinguishes between individual-level and organization-level effects of PM, and includes reflections on the appreciation of PM by public sector employees. The findings highlight that PM use and attributes such as fairness, subjectivity, and clarity significantly impact the outcomes yielded by PM systems. This paper contributes by synthesizing prior research on public sector PM and by identifying research gaps, areas of debate, and avenues for future research. In addition, findings from this review have the potential to add nuance to the sometimes-polarized debate on the acclaimed “benefits” and “costs” of PM in the public sector.

Austerity policies have affected local government for over a decade challenging their financial resilience to cope with further financial shocks. Using a financial resilience framework, this paper examines whether lower tier authorities behave in the same way as their higher tier counterparts when it comes to financial resilience to shocks. From a detailed field study of three lower tier (district) authorities in English local government, it is concluded that they do not have the capacity to ‘Bounce Forwards’. They can only ‘Bounce Back’ in the short term and even that is becoming increasingly difficult.

Harmonization of public sector accounting is attracting increasing attention from scholars and practitioners. A focal component of this phenomenon is the setting of accounting standards, whose legitimacy is paramount to their application. As participation by constituents is considered fundamental for ensuring this legitimacy, in this study, we focus on participation through comment letters in the due process. In particular, we explore the type of respondents, their geographical area, their agreement/disagreement with the documents prepared by the International Public Sector Accounting Standards Board (IPSASB) and the issues of importance to them, through an analysis of the comment letters submitted for six projects launched over the period 2017–2020 by the IPSASB. Furthermore, we analyze some factors that may affect countries’ participation in the due process. The analysis enriches our understanding of the IPSASB's due process and provides relevant insights for the growing research into accounting standard-setting.

Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) play an active role in the government's accountability to the parliament. Public–private partnerships (PPPs) are a different route used to deliver infrastructure-based public services by private sector entities compared to traditional public procurement. Due to their nature, PPPs raise specific issues related to transparency for public accountability and SAIs, through the independent and competent audit they provide, may enhance the information content of the accountability relationship between the government and the parliament. We conducted a documentary analysis of 16 PPP audit reports issued by the Portuguese Court of Auditors (CoA) to analyze the audit process and outputs. Overall, our evidence suggests that the CoA, through the audit reports, reduced the information asymmetry by disclosing relevant information for more comprehensive public scrutiny and political accountability of PPPs and made several recommendations towards better PPP governance and management. Furthermore, our findings corroborate the two functions of SAIs, which can both be found in the same audit report: the watchdog function (magistrate and public accountant roles), drawing attention to failures at different stages of the PPP cycle, and the shepherding function (management accountant role), providing advice to the Government towards best practices on PPP governance and management. Considering the Government's reactions to the audit reports and the information available about CoA's recommendations implementation, there are doubts about the desired audit impact on the auditee's change of PPPs governance and management.