The publication of International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSASs) in the field of governmental financial reporting has raised the necessity for a wide-ranging discussion about the harmonization of public sector accounting systems. The article has a double aim: to show the adoption or not of IPSASs in local and central government and to analyse the level of convergence between the different countries studied. In order to achieve these objectives, we carried out an empirical study, whose results allow us to show that while some accounting systems are very close to the IPSASs model, others are completely different. Nevertheless, we think that this could be a starting point and that in the near future countries could tend towards IPSASs more and more, which may be the most probable way to reach convergence accounting systems between them.
The International Public Sector Accounting Standards have been seen as a path towards the modernization of governmental accounting, and many countries have made efforts to adopt them. The purpose of this article is to analyse the stimuli and barriers to the adoption of International Public Sector Accounting Standards, as well as their main benefits, using a structural equation model. The research methodology is based on a questionnaire sent to American and European Union countries that has been used to construct a structural model, and our results show that comparability and modernization are direct benefits of International Public Sector Accounting Standards implementation, and that both adopter and non-adopter countries value these positive impacts. This justifies the process of harmonization that the European Commission recently started. Points for practitioners The analysis of the impact of International Public Sector Accounting Standards in the international context shows to what extent the adoption of International Public Sector Accounting Standards are useful for modernizing governmental accounting and achieving accounting comparability. Describing the experience of countries that have adopted International Public Sector Accounting Standards can help practitioners and professionals who participate in modernizing accounting systems, such as the European Union. Many countries are now moving towards International Public Sector Accounting Standards and the experiences of pioneer countries can serve as a learning process. This article shows that introducing International Public Sector Accounting Standards can have many advantages in practice and that countries that have implemented these standards consider that they allow an increase in transparency and accountability.
A broad debate about the harmonization of public sector accounting standards in Europe is underway. The authors provide arguments in favour of harmonization, but they also acknowledge the existing pluralism and diversity by taking stock of the state of play in 14 European countries. The paper makes a proposal for a way forward for policy-makers and standard-setters, in which the benefits of harmonization can be obtained without obliging EU member countries to necessarily abandon their current public sector accounting systems
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.