EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Government Accounting Standards and Policies

James L. Chan and Qi Zhang

Chapter 34 in The International Handbook of Public Financial Management, 2013, pp 742-766 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract In the public financial management cycle, accounting follows budgeting and precedes auditing to produce financial information useful for understanding and assessing a government’s financial conditions. Financial accounting — the branch of government accounting concerned with measuring the financial consequences of actual transactions and events — is regulated by rules to ensure the quality of both the inputs and outputs of the accounts of governments. Some of the rules, called accounting standards, are proposed for adoption by a government as its accounting policies for actual implementation. After some preliminary remarks, this chapter provides a concise guide to government financial accounting standards and policies. Particular reference is made to international public sector accounting standards (IPSAS), which have become influential as an exemplar of accrual accounting. The chapter also describes the experiences of several countries in introducing accrual accounting. The chapter concludes that accrual accounting is desirable to improve the comprehensiveness and transparency of financial reporting by government, but it requires that certain preconditions be met before it can be successfully implemented. The chapter therefore ends with some recommendations to governments, especially those in developing countries, that are considering the transition to accrual accounting.

Keywords: Accounting Standard; International Financial Reporting Standard; Financial Accounting; Financial Account Standard Board; Audit Opinion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-31530-4_35

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781137315304

DOI: 10.1057/9781137315304_35

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2025-04-01
Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-31530-4_35