Public Sector Accounting and Budgeting

Public Sector Accounting and Budgeting

Investigating the effect of laws, human resources and accounting standards on proper implementation of accrual basis in Iran’s public sector financial reporting

Document Type : Original Article

Authors
Mahdi Saber 1
Mahdi Nazemi Ardakani 2
1 M. A. in Accounting, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran
2 Assistant Professor of Accounting, Yazd University, Yazd, Iran
Abstract
With the formation of the Committee of Iran’s Public Sector Accounting Standards Development, this profession has been given more attention to for several years, and based on the standards and guidelines published by the committee mentioned and the requirements of the Ministry of Economy, the accounting accrual basis has been used in governmental organizations since 2015. The present study attempts to address the potentials for reporting in governmental accounting on accrual basis in Iran. The most important points include (1): potentials of financial and accounting regulations, (2) required human resources, and (3) the capacity of governmental accounting standards and methods. In order to gather dada for the first and the third hypotheses questionnaires containing 24 questions, and for the second hypothesis another one containing 20 questions were distributed among 111 individuals working in this field. In order to investigate the hypotheses, a single sample t-test and a sign test beside SPSS were applied. In addition, Friedman ANOVA test was used to prioritize variables. Findings suggest that financial and accounting regulations in public sector in Iran provide potentials for accrual accounting. Standards and governmental accounting methods in public sector in Iran have relatively capacity of being reported as accrual -based. In addition, human resources in public sector in Iran have relatively capacity for accrual-based reporting that makes it necessary to hold more training courses for the human resource in order to stablish the system of accrual accounting correctly in public sector. 
Keywords
Public sector
Accrual basis
Laws and regulations
Elements of accrual accounting
Responsibility of accountability

Subjects

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  • Receive Date 28 June 2021
  • Revise Date 24 July 2021
  • Accept Date 22 August 2021