Local Government Accounting and Financial Reporting in Spain has been recently reformed by the new Accounting Instructions published in 2103 and in force since the 1st of January 2015. Once the financial reports corresponding to 2016 fiscal year have been published, the main purpose of this paper is to empirically evaluate, the perceptions and opinions that local governmental accountants have about the recent reform. Our analysis has found a clear gap between the aims of the reform and the opinion of local governmental accountants, who consider the system too complex and clearly biased towards financial accounting information.
The external audit of financial reports concerned with Spanish Regional Governments is characterized by a high degree of heterogeneity. The scope of the reports, their content and their structure present significant differences. In some regions, the audit reports are issued by regional audit institutions, while in others, that have not yet developed those audit regional bodies, reports are approved and issued by the Central Government Audit Supreme Court of Accounts .This paper pursues a double purpose. On the one hand, to classify Spanish Regional Governments according to the development of their auditing systems, taking into account the scope and content of the reports issued by the different audit institutions. On the other hand, the aim to establish a relationship between (a) the degree of development of the different external audit systems and (b) the financial position of each region and their degree of compliance with budgetary stability rules.
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