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Public Sector Accounting 6th ed
This book is about government budgeting, accounting and auditing, from an accountant?s perspective. Government budgeting, particularly, can underemphasise ? even ignore ? accounting. Our purpose is to portray the whole of government, being the core part of the public sector, through the eyes of accountants. We do this by concentrating on the possibilities of accounting technique. Throughout, we combine discussion of the importance of the techniques with their limitations. Nevertheless, the book depends on the importance of accounting technique. Historically and around the world, introductory accounting and intermediate accounting are taught in the context of for-profit organisations. This book assumes a basic understanding of such accounting. Its method is to focus on those matters that can be different in governments, even while there is significant overlap in accounting for governments, non-profits and for-profits. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the nature of the public sector, the heart of which is the sovereignty of governments ultimately controlled by politicians. It introduces the nature of government, governance and public management, public finance, public money and the role of accountants in the public sector. Chapter 2 is an overview of performance measurement, which permeates all aspects of government budgeting, accounting and auditing. It identifies distinctive challenges of performance measurement for accounting. Chapter 3 details the technical fundamentals of accounting. These are the same in all organisations, whether governmental, for-profit or not-for-profit, but the public sector context shifts the emphasis among these fundamentals. The chapter also discusses two other forms of accounting ? national accounting and government budgeting ? that complement and sometimes compete with public sector accounting. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 are concerned with budgeting. Chapter 4 deals broadly with budgetary policies and processes. Chapter 5 explains the common forms, and associated content, that government budgets can take. Chapter 6 concerns budgetary control, which is a dominant function of accounting, but one that can be exercised in different ways. Chapter 7 addresses costing techniques, which by their nature are less extensively used in government than in for-profits but, when they are used, can have important consequences for managers, politicians, service recipients and taxpayers. Chapter 8 is about financial reporting. There are significant overlaps between reporting standards for all organisations, but there are distinctive issues for governments ? budgetary reporting, consolidated financial statements and special accrual accounting issues. There are also particular issues relating to policymaking and policymakers? conceptual frameworks. Chapter 9 deals with auditing. Here, too, there is much overlap between organisations of all kinds, but the distinctive issues in government are of importance. These are the definition of audit independence; financial, regularity and performance audits; internal audits and internal control; attitudes to materiality; and budget auditing. Every chapter includes a further reading list. These are not usually developments of technical accounting matters. Some of the publications listed are from non-accounting literature, for the accountant to use in a wider understanding of technique. Most, however, are from accounting literature. This typically takes the understanding of technique as given but then situates it in wider contexts, allowing a fuller discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of technique. This is especially necessary given that technical accounting developments tend to be made by accounting?s standard-setting bodies or consultants, not academics. Nevertheless, it remains true that accounting technique and this wider context are difficult to marry. There is little theoretical understanding of the relationship between government accounting systems and social, economic and political success. The further reading lists therefore mainly provide a basis for developing our understanding. The illustrative examples used throughout are generic, for the mythical City of Eutopia, and themselves are based on pure matters of accounting technique. In Eutopia?s financial statements we use generic forms rather than arbitrarily imposing one particular set of accounting standards. The examples use numbers but not mainly for the purposes of training the reader in making calculations. Rather, this is done to make the illustrations more meaningful. We represent Eutopia not as an ideal government but an ideal for understanding the possibilities and limits of government accounting technique. We willingly concede that soldiers, police officers, social workers, teachers and nurses (among others) might imagine that Eutopia is situated on the edges of an infernal place to which its accountants daily commute. This sixth edition is very different from the previous editions. The earlier editions were essentially the first edition, published in 1982, with marginal changes made since then. The sixth edition, however, reflects the fact that there have been fundamental changes in public sector accounting over this last generation and a half ? changes that no doubt, in part, have been facilitated by the information revolution we are living through. The major changes since the 1970s are that there were then no sets of public sector accounting standards, but now there are, including one international set, and some of them are based on for-profit standards. The only set of public sector auditing standards then was that used by the US Federal Government, known (as it still is) as the Yellow Book. It was, however, actually a booklet of 54 small pages. Also, the recording, use and publication of output measures were then the exception, but now they are ubiquitous. The result of all these changes is that there has been a narrowing of the differences between government, non-profit and for-profit accounting. The changes have also brought greater comparative understanding of government accounting between jurisdictions within each country and between countries. No longer is it possible to make the joke, as one professor did in 1986 when introducing a seminar on ?international government accounting?, that the term seemed to him to be an oxymoron. Having said that, Anglophone accounting still dominates the discourse (if quantity of literature is the measure), which is an especially troubling matter given that, presumably, most government accounting in the world is not practised in English. This book does not help in this: it is firmly Anglophone, primarily as a generalisation of UK and some US theory and practice.
Call Number | Location | Available |
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Tan 657. 835 009 4 Jon p | PSB lt.dasar - Pascasarjana | 0 |
Penerbit | Harlow Pearson., 2010 |
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Subjek | Buka di https://remote lib.ui.ac.id/menu |
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