Accounting Reform in Italy and Perceptions on the Local Government Consolidated Report

ABSTRACT

The article aims to explore the perception of local government (LG) financial officers on the users, the uses, and the utility of the consolidated financial report in Italy, since it was one of the first countries to expressly provide for compulsory adoption. A questionnaire was sent to a statistical stratified sample of LG, collecting 133 responses (response rate 17%). The results, tested through the structural equation model we observe that social legitimization pressure rather than accountability patterns or performance analysis drive more the adoption process. The evidence indicates that the report is perceived as a potential tool for pursuing performance assessment strategies in a group context. However, this potentiality depends on the coordination effort made by the LG. The article finds out the rise of the topic of the public governance and the role of coordinating the local public group.

KEYWORDS:

• Consolidated report
• local government
• accounting reform
• public governance

Notes

¹ In order to make the results clearer and graphically illustratable, given the orderability of the answers provided by the councils interviewed, a value of 5 has been assigned to the option “very important,” 4 to “important,” 3 to “fairly important,” 2 to “not very important,” and 1 to “not important.” Subsequently, the mean score for each stakeholder category was calculated. The nearer the score attributed is to the maximum attributable value, i.e., 5, the greater the importance given by the stakeholders to the consolidated financial report.

² In this case, to facilitate reading, the numerical transposition was performed using the following scale: positively influenced, score +1; negatively influenced, score –1; not influenced, score 0. This data-processing mode is proposed in Tables 3 and 4.