Over the past 25 years, significant New Public Management (NPM) reforms, particularly towards accrual accounting, have characterized the public sector in many countries. The diversity in public financial information systems created a need for harmonization, resulting in the elaboration of the International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS). Despite their relevance, little is known on the adoption process of IPSAS. This study aims to examine to what extent IPSAS(-like) accrual accounting is adopted in central/local governments worldwide as well as to investigate which factors affect the differing level of their adoption. Methodologically, a specific questionnaire constructed to obtain relevant information from local experts was sent worldwide to a sample of countries. The study reveals an important move to accrual accounting, particularly to IPSAS accrual accounting, for which there still remains a level of reluctance mainly in central governments, especially in countries where businesslike accrual accounting has been developed. Points for practitioners: IPSAS have become the international reference for the development of public sector accounting systems worldwide. For this reason, IPSAS deserve the attention of accounting policy-makers, practitioners and scholars. The current study offers a comparative study of the level of adopting IPSAS worldwide as well as an explanation of the reasons behind the differing levels of adoption. The present study reveals that the transition towards IPSAS necessitates a long period of implementation whereby existing local business accounting regulations hinder jurisdictions from implementing international standards. The explanatory findings provide input for reformers and legislators when designing and developing financial information reforms.

This article provides new empirical evidence about Flemish municipal councilors’ use of financial information in the yearly budget debate. Since councilors generally do not handle information according to “standard use models,” we adopt an innovative method of data collection by scrutinizing their speech for the presence of financial information during the budget debate in Flemish municipalities. The incorporation of financial information in councilors’ contributions to the debate is conceptualized as a particular form of observable use of financial information. We quantitatively assess the presence of both budgetary and accrual financial information using a scoring technique taken from the management accounting literature. Additionally, we analyze whether various political and financial circumstances affect politicians’ mentioning of this information in their deliberations. Our results reveal a strong prevalence of budgetary information in councilors’ speech. This is influenced by both political conditions and the financial position of the municipality.

This article aims at contributing to the study of autonomous agencies by focusing on how they cope with steering from ministers and departments. Drawing from the trust literature, we look at how agencies co-operate with ministers and departments, in order to increase autonomy. A model is built to cluster several trust-building mechanisms and to link these to autonomy. We then apply this to a limited set of Flemish agencies. We conclude that agencies develop strategies to increase trust with the trustor. These strategies may be targeted either at the minister as a trustor or at the department as a competing trustee.

In this study, we seek to further delineate the reasons for the existence of shortfalls in the level of formal and material harmonization regarding the accrual-based rules in International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS) by analyzing the law, the executive order and the Turkish Central Government Public Reports from2010to 2014 (using a mixed method approach).We highlight that coercive pressure itself is insufficient for improving substantive performance and changing the internal structures of organizations, instead, such pressures cause decoupling in financial reporting. As a new finding in the context of a developing country, we suggest that there are several discrepancies between the law and the executive order. Moreover, we conclude that there are emerging country-specific reasons affecting the gap in the harmonization levels, including a lack of social pressure which tends to be prominent in developed countries, state domination over both civic matters and the private sector, and translation problems that arise during the adoption process.