Consequences and Costs of Financial Reporting Compliance for Local Government

Robyn Pilcher and Graeme Dean

European Accounting Review, 2009, vol. 18, issue 4, 725-744

Abstract: Local governments are continuously being subjected to changing legislation in regard to reporting requirements. Results of this research indicate that the amount of time allocated to complying with external reporting requirements was often considered excessive and not always relevant - detracting from the 'doing'. It was also revealed that the bottom line is perceived to be the most important indicator of a council's performance by stakeholders. From this, several implications emerge - including the potential for manipulation of accounting figures to achieve a target operating result. Another includes councils losing their original identity as service providers to the community. Hence, financial, political and social costs appear to be associated with continually changing financial reporting requirements imposed on local government. Future research proposes to take the derived questionnaire used here to other countries in order to determine whether data prepared using financial accounting standards (like the International Financial Reporting Standards) distort the information used by the various council decision makers.

Date: 2009
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09638180903334978 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:euract:v:18:y:2009:i:4:p:725-744

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/REAR20

DOI: 10.1080/09638180903334978

Access Statistics for this article

European Accounting Review is currently edited by Laurence van Lent

More articles in European Accounting Review from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().