'Sector Neutrality' and NPM 'Incentives': Their Use in Eroding the Public Sector

Despite New Zealans public-sector reformers' claims that financial reporting changes promote competitive neutrality and improved accountability and transparency, privatisation-favouring "incentives" were designed into the system at a hidden detailed level. That distorted system has been encompassed within the accounting profession's standard-setting activities through standard-setters' erroneous claims, in Australia and New Zealand, that the accounting profession's conceptual framework and accounting standards are sector-neutral. These claims help to conceal the fact that the public-sector financial management system has been designed to be partial, with its incentives structured to erode the public sector and favour privatisation.     

New Approaches in Reward: Their Relevance to the Public Sector

This article explains the concept of 'new' reward (for example variable pay, market-based pay, performance-related pay and team-based pay) and why recent UK governments have encouraged it. The extent and effectiveness of new pay practices in the public sector is investigated. The author concludes that the Government should not be pushing the public services to mimic what they perceive to be private sector reward practice.     

Use of CCA in the Public Sector: Lessons From Australia's Experience With Public Utilities

The background to the widespread adoption by Australian public trading enterprises of a deprival value variant of current cost accounting reflects successive efforts to establish demanding rate of return targets, or to legitimise price increases, or to monitor the financial performance of PTEs on a national basis. The experience of three public utilities in implementing CCA is reviewed. This experience suggests that CCA valuation of infrastructure (using deprival or optimized deprival values) is unable to deliver financial data to permit valid cross-sectional and longitudinal comparisons of performance. Issues raised during the 1970s and 1980s debates about CCA were either ignored or overlooked.     

Public Sector Downsizing: An Introduction

Authorities throughout the developing world are turning to downsizingin an effort to reduce budget deficits and address the inefficienciesengendered by state-led development strategies. Because large-scaleinvoluntary dismissals are often politically difficult, a voluntaryapproach to reductions in public sector employment is increasinglypopular among developing-country governments, multilateral organizations,and donor countries. This article (and, more generally, theresearch project on Public Sector Retrenchment) attempts tosketch a protocol for public sector downsizing that takes intoaccount the costs and benefits for the workers and the economy. After reviewing the international experience with downsizing,the article addresses five questions: how to identify the redundantworkers, how to predict their losses from separation, how todesign compensation and assistance packages, how to assess thefinancial and economic returns to downsizing, and how to dealwith downsizing in one-company towns. Based on the answers tothese questions, a decision tree is proposed.     

Jurisdictional Competition Between Private and Public Sector Auditors:The Case of the Danish Certified Public Sector Auditor Qualification

Abstract: This paper explores the apparent paradox that while public sector auditors have become more powerful by claiming performance auditing expertise and linking this to New Public Management reforms, the same reforms have provided an opening for competition between private and public sector auditors. In Denmark, the competitive relation has led to a jurisdictional dispute between public and private sector auditors in which the former have developed a special qualification for public sector auditors. The paper analyses the development of this qualification using Abbott's (1988) theory of the system of professions, thus focusing on how the involved groups have attempted to build networks of support for their competing jurisdictional claims of expertise. The case contributes to knowledge about the potential for development of a distinct public sector auditor identity. The case suggests that to develop such an identity and gain professional recognition, public sector auditors need to convince parliaments, standard‐setting bodies and universities that a public sector auditing qualification serves as a solution to some of their problems, too.     

Securitization in Public Sector Finance

Already commonplace in the private sector, the securitization of future income streams is now being promoted in the public sector as a means of accessing investment capital. This article reports on a British university's securitization of 30 years' future rents on its student accommodation. Although the securitization made it possible to refurbish the residences, it has turned out to be costly in other respects. The authors conclude that investment returns in the public sector will rarely be sufficient to cover the finance costs of securitization; that the loss of the securitized income in labour-intensive public services is virtually certain to cost jobs; and that the accounting treatment of securitization needs to incorporate a realistic calculation of the movements in effective debt. Finally the article recommends that the value for money of any proposed public sector securitization should be independently checked by comparing its total cost of capital with the returns on its proposed uses.