The challenges of accountability in a national museum

Abstract

Using documentary evidence of the Auditor-General's commentaries in the annual reports of the National Museum of Papua New Guinea (PNG) for the period 2004–2012, this paper considers the reporting compliance of the National Museum of PNG. Textual analysis takes into account the complexity of the expectations placed on museums to provide an account of their activities and the mandatory reporting requirements placed on the National Museum of PNG by PNG legislation. Recently, there have been no annual reports generated by the museum, suggesting a low level of compliance. Findings by the state auditor show that the museum often submits late financial statements for audit and receives disclaimers of opinion when they are submitted. The study suggests ways that the museum could achieve greater reporting compliance. It appears that greater funding and staffing of the museum would assist in the preparation of reports.

Keywords:

• National Museum of Papua New Guinea
• reporting compliance
• textual analysis
• disclaimers of opinion
• national museums
• museum management

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank three anonymous referees and the editor for their very helpful advice.

Notes on contributor

Alistair M. Brown is an accounting academic at Curtin University, Australia, with an interest in regional accountancy focusing on the low-income economies of the Pacific and Asia.

Notes

1. A broader view of accounting sees accounting as providing more than simply the collection, analysis, interpretation and reporting of financial accounts. It has the capacity to create technical and symbolic power to calculate, compare and contrast possibilities for alternative policy decisions (Maurer 2002; Carruthers and Espeland 1991). It might be said, therefore, that accounting also has a deep connection with broader non-financial accounting considerations providing the bedrock of information about commercial abstractions such as valuations of collections and contingent valuations. Indeed, in measuring heritage assets, museums utilise accounting vocabulary to shed commercial light on their multitudinous serviceable benefits (Arts Council England 2012). In this way, cost–benefit analysis might be deployed by museum management in order to quantify in monetary terms the costs and benefits of its assets, which may not necessarily have a conventional market value (Asma 2011).

2. Similarly, a museum may use accounting numerics to calculate existence value (the value placed by people on the continued existence of a museum service or good), as well as use value (the estimate of the value of people's use of a product or service of a museum even if it is free) to generate a sense of the ‘economic footprint’, ‘contingent valuation’ or ‘social return of investment’ of a museum, couched in terms of economy, effectiveness and efficiency (Arts Council England 2012; Zan 2000). While these commercial constructions may be used by economics, for example, to justify public subsidies for cultural institutions, it is accounting information that provides the calculus for these constructions and thus forms an important part of broader issues of reporting.

3. In addition, the lack of mandatory reporting suggests that management has little opportunity to conduct cost–benefit analysis to quantify in monetary terms of the costs and benefits of museum assets. In a broader sense, the lack of preparedness by the National Museum to generate timely annual reports indicates that it is difficult to ascertain a sense of the ‘economic footprint’, ‘contingent valuation’ or ‘social return of investment’ of the museum. Consistent with the assertions of Cannon-Brookes (1993), an inadequate reporting system may mean that museum objects are susceptible to a lack of preventive and active conservation, as well as restoration of individual objects. Gstraunthaler and Piber (2007, 365) claim that ‘accounting in museums tends to create certain attitudes’ and it must be said that in the case of the National Museum that there appears little motivation by management to imbue written understandings of valuation and measurement of key assets. The calculation of costs to derive optimal economy, effectiveness and efficiency (Zan 2000) is absent.