International Trends in Government Accounting

There is no standardized global framework for the adoption and implementation of accrual government accounting. This has lead to a questioning of the consistency and comparability of financial statements prepared and presented in different jurisdictions. Two approaches are widespread which deal with the issue of financial consistency and comparability across nations and organizations; the accounting approach and the statistical approach. Whilst the former uses accounting standards for the preparation and presentation of general purpose financial statements, the later emphasizes the statistical bases for producing accounting information for economic analysis and policy making. Many countries have adopted both approaches providing widely different financial measurements. This seems not to be an effective way of using resources. However, there are some promising bridges between them in applying and requiring consistent financial information. Harmonizing these two systems into a single set of government reports is a significant issue in international issue in public sector accounting.