Governmental budgeting as ex ante financial accounting: The United Kingdom case

For many years now the academic governmental-budgeting literature has concentrated almost exclusively on the politics and economics of the budgetary process at the expense of the mechanical foundations. Consequently, we see an interesting but insulated discussion about political involvement and about the strengths and weaknesses of planning models. What we do not see is a discussion of the accounting perspective. This paper offers such a discussion. It explains local government budgeting as “ex ante financial accounting” and offers some important implications of this re-interpretation.     

Management and Accounting Developments in Executive Agencies

The executive agency programme has moved ahead rapidly since its introduction in 1988 and by 1996 over 70% of all civil servants were working under executive agency conditions. This has resulted in a major change in the structure of the civil service and in the management of the activities of central government. The question that then emerges concerns the benefits, if any, that these changes have brought about. This paper reports the results of a survey of a sample of senior managers in executive agencies. The survey attempted to ascertain the extent to which agencification was felt to have led to increases in autonomy and freedom to manage and also to obtain the views of managers on a range of issues including changes in operational effectiveness and quality of service delivery. These, after all, are some of the key measures of the success or otherwise of the agencification programme. The survey also examined changes in specific management accounting practices and a broad overview of the findings is provided in the paper. In general, it seems that the senior managers of executive agencies do feel that agencification has achieved many of the benefits hoped for and that is has brought about changes and improvements in management and management accounting practices.     

UK Accountants' Perceptions of Research Journal Quality

The process of research quality assessment is now firmly established in UK universities. The quality of the journals in which academic papers are published is an important input to the assessment process. The relative quality of these journals is clearly difficult to establish in an objective manner. This paper contributes to the debate about relative quality by conducting a peer review. Eighty-eight UK accounting academics reported their degree of familiarity with, and perceptions of quality of, a total of 44 journals in the accounting and finance discipline. Accounting and Business Research and theBritish Accounting Review were the two most familiar academic journals. The most highly ranked journals were generally from the US.     

Government auditing in China: Problems and reform

This paper evaluates the current government auditing system in China and the proposal to move it from the control of the executive body (the State Council) to the control of the legislature (the National People's Congress). Interviews with government auditors, government and people's congress officials, and leading academics identify the problems caused by lack of audit independence. Although audit independence can be increased by moving the control of government auditing to the legislature, many of our interviewees considered such a move as infeasible in the current political climate. To smooth the reform toward a legislature-led audit system, we propose a “Dual-Track System” in which the different audit responsibilities currently undertaken by the government auditing system are separated. The responsibility for auditing the use and control of fiscal budgets by the central and regional governments would be under the control of the legislature as this area of government auditing has a clear need for audit independence. Other audit functions including economic responsibility auditing, special purpose funds auditing, financial service auditing and state-owned enterprise auditing would remain under the control of the government. This dual track approach would, we argue, be a politically acceptable compromise as it would strengthen audit independence where it is most needed but also enable the government to maintain strong economic control.     

Resource Accounting and Executive Agencies

Executive agencies have had several years' experience of the introduction and development of accruals based accounting systems. Senior agency managers therefore provide an authoritative source of information on the problems that could follow from introducing it more widely across government. A survey of senior managers revealed that, despite major improvements in accounting information systems, agencies still face difficulties in implementing accruals accounting. Government departments also seem unlikely to accept easily the switch from cash accounting to accruals accounting without extensive training. The effort and resources required for this should not be underestimated.     

A Critical Appreciation of the Uses for Strategic Management Thinking, Systems and Techniques in British Universities

The Dearing Commission's examination of British higher education has given further impetus to the need for strategy making at an institutional level. Recent policy developments are examined as a background and rationale for the use of institutional strategy. Intrinsic difficulties are then considered in managing universities strategically. Several techniques and ideas are evaluated to help resolve such problems, before adapting Porter's generic strategies and value chain concepts and placing them within a stakeholder focus group framework. Critical conclusions are then drawn on current higher education policy and the consequent use of institutional strategy in a fast changing environment.