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This paper adds to literature on financial audit in public sector organizations. The authors examined the effect of adapting a private sector audit body—the Board of Statutory Auditors (BoSA)—for u...

Drawing on upper echelons theory, the article investigates the potential impact of top managers’ background and demographic characteristics and personality traits on organizational decisions in the public sector. The top-management figure being investigated is the municipal chief financial officer (CFO) and the specific organizational decision under analysis is the extent of revenue misrepresentation during both budget formulation and execution. The empirical setting is provided by the CFOs of Italian municipalities with populations above 15,000 over a 3-year period (2012–14). Financial data are drawn from existing databases. Non-financial data are collected through an online survey. The results show that top managers’ individual characteristics and traits do influence the extent of accounting manipulation. In particular, revenue misrepresentation was found to be smaller in the presence of female managers, managers with degrees in business administration, and managers describing themselves as “conscientious”. These effects on accounting manipulation were moderated by auditors’ and opposition councilors’ oversight, managers’ experience, and the presence of local elections. The article extends upper echelons theory and its applications in several directions: from the private to the public context, from CEOs to CFOs, from managerial decisions in general to accounting choices, and from background and demographic variables to personality traits.

Accounting innovations, and especially the introduction of accruals accounting, are often portrayed as fundamental aspects of publicsector reforms. An increasing body of literature has been studying the experiences of different countries and levels of government, often referring to Lueder's (1992) "contingency model" and its subsequent developments. This model highlights a number of social, political, and administrative variables that are likely to affect government accounting innovations. It applies at a country-wide level and is mainly intended to describe and compare the environments within which accounting reforms take place, as well as the technical features of such reforms. Our paper, on the contrary, tries to expand the contingency model by applying it to individual organisations and by testing its explanatory power.

The introduction of accrual accounting in Italian Local Governments has been mandated in a way that permits, and in fact encourages, a merely formal compliance. Local Governments must produce accrual-based financial statements, but double-entry bookkeeping is not mandatory, nor may traditional budgetary accounting be abandoned. Why, then, should they bother to introduce an integrated system of budgetary and accrual accounting? In this paper, we empirically investigate the determinants of Local Government's choices of accounting innovation. According to our results, ‘rational’ elements such as complexity, types of activities performed, presence of surpluses, and access to capital markets are seemingly unhelpful in explaining why a Local Government decides to introduce accrual accounting. What counts are ‘institutional’ and cultural explanations, such as the perceptions of CFOs and the North-South divide.

Purpose– Budgeting is central in public organizations. From a research viewpoint, it is an extremely multifaceted and potentially rich field to investigate and develop. The changing institutional and socio-economic landscape, moreover, requires a profound reassessment of its roles and features in accounting studies. The purpose of this paper is to review the existing European literature on public budgeting, looking at how public administration, public management, and accounting contribute to current budgeting theories and practices and to advance a proposal on how they can individually and jointly contribute in the future.Design/methodology/approach– The authors collect and analyze all the papers on public budgeting in the European context that were published in all the issues of 15 major accounting and public-management journals since 1980.Findings– Budgeting has so far played a rather marginal role in European public management and accounting research. Among the existing papers, most focus on the Anglo-Saxon context, look at the intra-organizational aspects of budgeting, emphasize its managerial and allocative functions, either adopt an interpretive theoretical framework or make no explicit reference to theory, and rely on qualitative analyses. Public budgeting lies at the intersections between different disciplines and professions, but this multifacetedness has been largely neglected by the existing literature. These intersections thus offer significant opportunities for future research. Building on the distinction between the intra- and inter-organizational foci of budgeting, between its different functions (i.e. allocative, managerial, external accountability), and between the accounting and the public administration and management perspectives, the authors propose possible future research topics.Originality/value– Budgeting plays a central role in public organizations and is used to allocate a large share of national incomes. This paper explores the existing literature and puts forward some potentially fruitful avenues for future research.

Over the last decade, many countries have introduced accruals accounting at one or more levels of government, as a component of wider public-sector reforms (Hood, 1991 and 1995; Olson et al., 1998; and Lueder and Jones, 2003). In the literature, the introduction of accruals accounting has been the subject of significant debate. Supporters have emphasised its ability to better meet user needs and its consistency with the overall shift from ex-ante constraints to ex-post accountability. Critics have raised both theoretical and practical objections. At first sight, an appealing compromise would be for accruals accounting to coexist with traditional, cashor commitment-based budgetary accounting, letting governments reap the benefits of ‘both worlds’. This compromise is being increasingly discussed among academics, professionals and policy-makers, but empirical evidence is still scarce. This paper draws from the experience of Italian Local Governments (LGs) to empirically analyse the effects of such coexistence. The paper is organised into five further sections. The next section reviews the existing literature and specifies the research questions. The third section provides a short background on Italian LGs’ accounting system. The fourth section describes materials and methods. Results are presented in the fifth section. The final section draws some conclusions and discusses implications for policy makers and researchers.

Reforms of the public health-care sector have emphasised the role of management accounting (MA). However, there is little systematic evidence on its use and benefits. To fill this gap, we propose a contingency-based model which addresses three related issues, that is, whether: (i) MA use is influenced by contextual variables and MA design; (ii) top-management satisfaction with MA mediates the relationship between MA design and MA use; and (iii) financial performance is influenced by MA use. A questionnaire was mailed out to all Italian public health-care organisations. Structural equation modelling was performed to validate the research hypotheses. The response rate was 49%. Our findings suggest that: (i) cost-containment strategies encourage more sophisticated MA designs; (ii) MA use is directly and indirectly influenced by contingency, organisational, and behavioural variables; (iii) a weakly significant positive relationship exists between MA use and financial performance. These findings are relevant from the viewpoint of both top managers and policymakers. The former must make sure that MA is not only technically advanced, but also properly understood and appreciated by users. The latter need to be aware that MA may improve performance in ways and along dimensions that may not fully translate into better financial results.

The Italian National Health Service introduced quad-markets, regionalization, and managerialism in the 1990s. Under quasi-markets, large providers have been separated from purchasers and funded by ‘activity’—the quantity, mix, and possibly appropriateness of services provided. Under regionalization, each of Italy's 21 regional governments is able to design its own funding arrangements. The regions have generally been trying to mitigate the effects of quasi-markets and are now increasingly ‘governing’ them. The system is producing some desirable results, including a shift from ordinary to same-day hospitalizations and a reduction in length of stay. Hospital admissions increased initially, but only where the regions encouraged this. Financial effects are more controversial.

Since 1995 Italian Local Governments have been required to publish an accrual-based report. However, traditional cameralistic budgeting and reporting remain mandatory. The purpose of this paper was to study the actual implementation of accrual reporting. To this end, an analysis was carried out on a sample of LGs' financial reports. Results were not encouraging. Although the cameralistic [bottom line] (current surplus) and its accruals counterpart (net income) were not particularly correlated, the reliability of many statements was seriously jeopardised by large errors and the difference between current surplus and net income was often largely explained by unexpected items. Moreover, 'typical' accrual-accounting items were often set to nil and disclosure, if any, was usually minimal. Practical and technical problems are likely to explain some of such results. However, for the future, user needs are the crucial issue. As long as cameralistic accounting remains the LG's main accounting system, dominates budgeting, provides the information required by the most important external users while all other potential users remain rather indifferent, accruals accounting is likely to remain marginalised and the solution of technical and practical problems to produce very little benefits.

Jones and Pendlebury (1992) have emphasised that “accounting is a purposive activity”, i.e. it is “directed towards a specified end” and “must above all be useful”. Luder (1992) has shown that the existing cross-country variations in government accounting models stem from environmental pressures and from the needs of external and internal users. This paper focuses on the relationship between the goals assigned to local government (LG) accounting systems over time and their technical features, and aims at identifying the main methodological issues concerning such relationship.