From Cash to Accruals in 25 Years

In a personal account, the author looks back over nearly 25 years of public sector accounting in the UK. He reviews the period when accruals accounting began to replace cash accounting in the operational branches of the public sector, and concludes that, for the public sector, capital asset and depreciation accounting is the most important innovation. Accrual accounting's impact on 'ex ante' budgeting, funding, pricing and investment may be much more important than on 'ex post' financial reporting and accountability.     

New development: Lessons and recommendations from South Korea’s experiences with integrated financial management information systems

ABSTRACT

The South Korean government has been reforming its public expenditure management system since 2004. During this time, South Korea adopted new budgeting processes (for example mid-term expenditure framework, top-down budgeting, performance-based budgeting) and developed a new integrated financial information management system. In the course of implementing these reforms, South Korea has important insights and lessons to share with developing countries.     

Budget Reporting in Local Government: Problem or Solution?

Budgeting practice in Victorian local government has been criticised by the ICAA, which has developed a standardised budgeting model. The Victorian government has prescribed standardised financial and budget reporting following a decade of reform in the public sector. This paper examines whether the criticism of local government budgeting is valid, and whether standardised models are appropriate, particularly in the context of ambiguous outcomes and lack of input-output relationships, criticism of the adoption of accrual accounting in the public sector, and a focus on the implementation of a flexible best-value regime designed to suit local conditions.     

CONNECTING ACCOUNTING AND EDUCATION IN THE UK: DISCOURSES AND RATIONALITIES OF EDUCATION REFORM

In this paper we analyze the processes which have structured the emphasis upon budgeting and accounting in the Local Management of Schools initiative by outlining the inter-relations between the discourses of neo-liberal government and economics, and the apparent “need” for the expansion of accounting and budgeting systems in the public sector and particularly education in the UK during the past six years.At the heart of our analysis is the contention that accounting and budgeting systems have been promoted throughout the UK public sector by connections to a discourse of managerial enterprise and economic rationality. The intersections between accounting techniques, and economic and managerial notions of decision making, responsibility and market organization have provided the complex discursive formation within which the accounting and budgeting innovations introduced under LMS have been presented and represented as “necessary” elements of proper public sector organization. The colonization of accounting into the education sector has been made possible by a series of seemingly unquestioned linkages, associations and reductions, upon which we offer a commentary, between the discourse of economic rationality and the techniques of accounting.     

THE ROLE OF THE PAYBACK PERIOD IN THE THEORY AND APPLICATION OF DURATION TO CAPITAL BUDGETING

The payback period has been a widely used capital budgeting tool in the analysis of capital projects. It has come under criticism for its inablility to consider all the project's flows in a present valued context. The purpose of this article is to present the duration measure in a capital budgeting framework and show how it is related to the payback period. The relationship is shown analytically and empirically. As a result, the payback period assumes a new identity which goes far to overcome the objections historically levied against it.     

Planning and Controlling UK Public Expenditure on a Resource Basis

The UK Government has, from 2003/04, completed the transition from planning and controlling public expenditure in cash to the full implementation of resource budgeting. Accounting had already switched to the resource basis, with effect from 2001/02. The 2002 Spending Review was the first biennial review of future spending levels and priorities to be conducted entirely on a resource basis. This article clarifies what was involved in this transition, paying attention to how it made the 2002 Spending Review different from its predecessors. Changes in both the fiscal framework and the accounting and budgeting systems have been designed to improve decision making at departmental level, and to improve information flows to Parliament and the public.     

中国公共预算改革的目标选择:近期目标与远期目标

本文运用凯顿的预算模式理论研究了中国公共预算改革的目标选择主要结论是,中国现阶段仍然应该以建立一种"控制取向"的现代公共预算体制为目标,中国预算改革的当务之急是将政治控制与行政控制纳入预算过程.最后,虽然新绩效预算是一种非常理想的预算模式,但是,中国目前并不具备实行的条件.即使对于实行新绩效预算来说,先实行一种"控制取向"的预算体制也是有帮助的.     

Cyclicality of SME lending and government involvement in banks

Recent regulatory efforts aim at lowering the cyclicality of bank lending because of its potentially detrimental effects on financial stability and the real economy. We investigate the cyclicality of SME lending of local banks with versus without a public mandate, controlling for location, size, loan maturity, capitalization, funding structure, liquidity, profitability, and credit demand-side factors. The public mandate is set by local governments and stipulates a sustainable provision of financial services to local customers and a deviation from strict profit maximization. We find that banks with a public mandate are 25% less cyclical than other local banks. The result is credit supply-side driven and especially strong for public mandate banks with high liquidity and stable deposit funding. Our findings have implications for the bank structure, financial stability and the finance-growth nexus in a local context.     

Local Crowding-Out in China

In China, between 2006 and 2013, local public debt crowded out the investment of private firms by tightening their funding constraints while leaving state-owned firms' investment unaffected. We establish this result using a purpose-built data set for Chinese local public debt. Private firms invest less in cities with more public debt, with the reduction in investment larger for firms located farther from banks in other cities or more dependent on external funding. Moreover, in cities where public debt is high, private firms' investment is more sensitive to internal cash flow.     

CANBERRA TO PORT MORESBY: GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTING AND BUDGETING FOR THE EARLY STAGES OF DEVOLUTION

This paper examines changes which have occurred in government accounting and budgeting from the antecedent system of Treasury control in the colonial era of The Territory of Papua and New Guinea to the contemporary system of Finance control in the Independent State of Papua New Guinea. An exposition is provided of existing and proposed governmental accounting and budgeting issues during the early stages of devolution for indigenous control. Although self-government provided new legislation for government accounting and budgeting, the critical event in the formation of the present system was the Constitution which highlighted indigenous responsibility against a backdrop of national attainment criteria. The development of indigenous responsibility for the government accounting and budgeting system has been limited by: (i) overreliance on an expatriate model, and (ii) a fundamental dearth of qualified accountants at the professional level in the public sector. In the longer term, however, cultural rather than administrative issues will tend to influence and guide policy in this area.     

Accounting and budgeting systems: The issue of congruency

The importance of designing an accounting system that is congruent with an organization's budgeting system has been noted in the literature. Unfortunately, in many government organization it is common to find incompatible budgeting and accounting systems. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether gearing the accounting information system to a zero-base budgeting system increases the perceived usefulness of the budgeting process. This issue is examined under conditions of both scare and abundant resources. Based on an empirical study, it is shown that the usefulness of a budgeting system to budget recipients may indeed be dependent on the accounting information system, conditioned on the availability of resources. Given the relationship between budgeting and public policy, implications of the study for the public policy making process are discussed.     

区块链技术在地方财政管理改革中的运用探究

区块链作为融合了分布式数据存储、点对点传输、共识机制、加密算法、智能合约等计算机技术的新兴应用模式,具有去中心化、数据不可篡改或重复、交易信息易于追踪和监督、交易流程公开透明等特征,为数字化时代下的财政管理改革和发展提供了新的思路和方向。本文在分析区块链技术特征的基础上,探究其在地方财政管理改革中的运用,为优化地方财政会计信息质量和预算编制流程、提高财政资金的使用效率、确保财政资金的合理合规使用和全流程可控、增加财政预决算信息公开透明度提出相关方案和建议。     

Funding and School Accountability: The Importance of Private and Decentralised Public Funding for Pupil Attainment

We discuss the issue of how schools should be financed, concentrating on the role of private funding and public funding via subnational governments as accountability mechanisms in the provision of educational services. The historical evolution of school regulation in Italy and Spain has created differences in the percentage of pupils who attend private schools, the percentage of private school funding coming from public and private sources and the percentage of public school funding that comes from central or local government sources. We take advantage of these institutional diversities rooted in history to estimate the disciplining role of these different sources of funding in the context of an educational production function using Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data. Our results provide support to both accountability mechanisms and point to the presence of an important interplay between them.     

MULTIPLE INTERNAL RATES OF RETURN: A REVISITATION

This paper investigates the utility of certain existing rules for the identification of non-imaginary internal rates of return in the capital budgeting process. More specifically, the paper demonstrates the applicability of Descartes' Rule of Signs, Budan's Theorem, and Sturm's Theorem from the theory of equations and rules developed in the business literature by Teichroew, Robichek, and Montalbano (1965a, 1965b), Mao (1969), Jean (1968, 1969), and Pratt and Hammond (1979). In so doing, the paper provides a framework that accounting, economic, and finance practitioners may use while grappling with the increasing possibility of multiple solutions in contemporary capital budgeting decisions.     

Budgetary behaviour in local government — A case study over 3 years

A case study of budgetary behaviour over three years revealed behaviour characterised by a confrontation between central and local actors during the first years of stagnating income. During the following year, this confrontation changed into disillusionment with the “unrealistic” expenditure limits. The general level of inflation also contributed to a refusal by the actors to take responsibility for the budget. In the final year mistrust of the whole budgeting procedure changed the focus of attention to a reorganization of the budgeting procedure. Budgeting was again fairly undramatic, but the procedural change did nothing to solve the underlying financial problems which the actors were in the process of discovering when the case study ended. Although Wildavsky's (1975) framework was found useful in explaining the observed behaviour, the context of the budgetary process was also found to be of critical importance.     

Output-based management and the management of performance: insights from the Victorian experience

During the 1990s, the nature of general and financial management practices within the public sectors of many jurisdictions underwent significant change. The Australian state of Victoria represents an example of a jurisdiction in which the extent of change was particularly large. In the context of that state’s adoption of an output-based budgeting and management framework, the development and reporting of performance indicator data became a matter of increased significance in sustaining continuous improvement. This paper reports the results of a study of performance data reported within the Victorian public sector, and highlights problems indicated by high degrees of turnover in inventories of reported indicators over time.     

When reform comes into play: budgeting as negotiations between administrations

This article addresses not a general theory of social change but a widespread phenomenon in public administration as a field of research: the endless succession of budgetary reforms in the public sector means that institutional change is of constitutive and strategic importance. How this change takes place is examined with the aid of the metaphor of budgeting as a game. The metaphor is elaborated with a view to integrating and conceptually framing existing approaches that describe the budgeting process as a game. A typology of rules permits investigation social and institutional embeddedness of budgeting and to describe change (budgetary reform) as change in action.     

Corporatisation and accounting change: The role of accounting and accountants in a Malaysian public utility

Using an explanatory case study, this paper presents an in-depth analysis of a Malaysian public utility which was required to transform itself into a self-financing, efficient and profitable organisation through a process of corporatisation. Despite attempts to enhance profitability by imposing new rules of budgeting, and by recruiting new accounting graduates, the case reveals that although accounting changes were enacted, over time they became separated from, and only loosely coupled to, other organisational activities. Concepts from institutional theory were used as sensitising devices to inform the research, but alone they were unable to fully explain the case. Consequently, an extended framework, which treats loose coupling as both a process and an outcome, and which recognises the intertwining of trust, resistance and power was developed. This theoretical framework provides a possible explanation for the mixed findings about the effectiveness of public sector financial reform which have been revealed in a wide array of research studies.     

Delivering Public Services Under the New Public Management: The Case of Public Housing

One of the biggest changes in public sector housing practice in recent years has been the introduction of New Public Management techniques. Housing associations, promoted by successive governments to supplement local authority provision of social housing, have readily taken on the new management agendas of performance indicators and business disciplines in service delivery. The author identifies a conflict between the social purposes of public funding for housing and the business practices of housing associations. The limited accountability of housing associations allows for practices that lead to social exclusion. For local authorities, a parallel conflict arises because of government emphasis on 'what works' in public housing management, rather than on 'what matters'.     

An examination of state and local government pension underfunding – Implications and guidance for governance and regulation

State and local government pension underfunding has become a major focus of public policy debate due in large part to recent Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) actions that have brought national attention to the issue. The extent of these plans underfunding has been debated, along with the necessity for state government intervention and the level of regulatory actions that should be enacted by state legislatures. State and local public pension plans do not fall under the enumerated powers of the federal government in the Constitution and are therefore left to each individual state to regulate. The amount of plan underfunding and enacted public policy by state varies greatly. Additionally, in contrast to numerous state balanced-budget laws, legal directives for fully funding public pensions are virtually non-existent. This paper analyzes the state and local public pension crisis, examines current and long-term risk, studies public employee fiscal conditions, considers the societal impacts of these plans, considers the strengths and weakness of pension plan types, recommends public policy and regulation, and offers strategies for managers, board members, and public officials to adopt.