ABSTRACT

As part of introducing accrual accounting in the public sector, many governments have – voluntarily – implemented the International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS) for financial reporting. Amongst other claimed benefits, IPSAS have been argued to facilitate comparison of adopters’ financial reports and to lead to favourable conditions on credit markets. However, governments that are confronted with the implementation decision face a trade-off between unaltered adoption, partial adoption, adaptation and non-adoption of standards. Drawing on insights from the literature on standardization and practice variation, this paper analyses the reasons, expressed by various actors from nine European countries, for deviating from implementing unaltered IPSAS and proposes a taxonomy of these reasons. The results show that, first, substantial deviations exist, and second, there is a plethora of reasons for them. These deviations are presented and then structured in the further course of the paper. As a consequence of deviations, achieving comparability as the central aim of standardization runs the risk of being undermined.

摘要

作为在公共部门引入权责发生制会计的一部分，许多政府自愿实施了国际公共部门会计准则 (IPSAS) 的财务报告。在其他声称的好处中，IPSAS 被认为有助于比较采用者的财务报告并导致信贷市场的有利条件。然而，面临实施决策的政府面临着在不改变采用、部分采用、适应和不采用标准之间进行权衡。本文借鉴关于标准化和实践差异的文献的见解，分析了来自九个欧洲国家的不同行为者表达的偏离实施未改变的 IPSAS 的原因，并提出了这些原因的分类。结果表明，首先，存在重大偏差，其次，有很多原因。这些偏差被提出，然后在本文的进一步过程中进行结构化。作为偏差的结果，实现可比性作为标准化的核心目标有被破坏的风险。