The Research On The Problems Of Public Liability Accounting

As an important part of governmental accounting and reporting, public liability is of great importance for evaluating government's financial position, for measuring government's fiscal risks and for making government's fiscal strategy. This dissertation is mainly concerning about how to improve Chinese governmental accounting so as to provide more and better information of public liability.The main content of this dissertation consists of the seven chapters as follows:Chapter 1: Introduction. This chapter gives a brief introduction to this dissertation, including the research category, the research's theoretical and practical significance, literature review, the research design and framework, the research methods, innovation and deficiency.Chapter 2: Probing into the practices of public liability accounting in China——history review and actualities analysis. This chapter reviews the public liability and the public liability accounting before and after the establishment of PRC, and analyses the major problems of Chinese public liability accounting at the present day.Chapter 3: International comparison and reference in public liability accounting——learning from America, U.K., Australia, New Zealand and France. This chapter is based on the comparison of public liability accounting among the five countries mentioned above, then analyses and summarizes the experience and lessons from such countries as America, U.K., France, Australia and New Zealand.Chapter 4: Accounting of the public direct liability. According to the analysis of limitations that exist in the public direct liability accounting, this chapter expatiates upon the problems of public direct liability accounting and the relevent revolution.Chapter 5: Accounting of the public contingent liability. This chapter interprets the characteristics, major inducement and fiscal consequence of Chinese public contingent liability by using the fundamental theory of economics, then puts forward the strategic suggestions upon upgrading the reporting practice of Chinese public contingent liability accounting by introducing the features of public contingent liability reporting in Australia, New Zealand and USA.Chapter 6: Accounting of the public implicit liability. By using the New Public Management theory, this chapter introduces the framework of government value dimension, and sets forth the relevant suggestions on improving the Chinese social security fund accounting and reporting, then expresses the opinions about legalizing and making explicit of the local government's borrowing behavior that's illegal at present.Chapter 7: Morass, reflection, and framework building of public liability accounting system in China. After analyzing in detail the morass that Chinese public liability accounting faces, this chapter reflects the morass and tries to build the Chinese public liability accounting system.This dissertation's innovations are presented as follows:1. This dissertation summarizes the research achievements of IFAC and IMF in public liability accounting, concludes the experience and lessons that other countries (USA, U.K., France, Australia and New Zealand) acquired, providing useful reference to Chinese public liability accounting revolution.2. This dissertation analyzes the content of Chinese public direct liability, and puts forward the concrete ideas for accounting revolution and suggestions on revolution.3. This dissertation builds the model interpreting the relationships between the fiscal opportunism and public contingent implicit liability, analyzes the connection between the fiscal opportunism and public contingent liability, and sets forth some strategic suggestions about the revolution on the public contingent accounting based on the relevant research conclusions.4. This dissertation analyzes the content of Chinese public implicit liability, refers to the experience abroad, and advances the concrete suggestions about the accounting and reporting methods to Chinese social security obligations.5. Based on Chinese circumstances, this dissertation points out the morass that Chinese public liability accounting faces coming from institutions, culture and technology, etc.6. This dissertation tries to build the framework of Chinese public liability accounting system.The main viewpoints of this dissertation are presented as follows:1. Presently, the core problems of Chinese public liability accounting lie in its inability to comprehensively report public liability. The direct cause is that Chinese existing budgetary accounting is mostly based on the cash basis , i.e.between the cash basis and the low-grade accrual basis.2. Direct liability is the liability with most definite content, with most clear creditor, and least difficult to measure among the public liabilities. According to the step by step principle, the direct liability should be treated as the starting point of the public liability accounting revolution.3. The deficiencies of the current governmental accounting practice have close relationship with the prevalence of fiscal opportunism.4. In order to improve the accounting report of public contingent liability, the government should start from the easy part then move forward to the difficult part, and begin with the disclosure of off financial statements. The government should observe the principles of materiality, prudence and cost-effectiveness. The government should also adopt the comparative and multi-dimension mode to report the public contingent liability.5. China should apply generational accounting so as to give a more scientific evaluation to the current social security policy, and should disclose the changes of social security fund's deficit in a long time by using complementary information of off financial statements.6. The public liability accounting is not a purely technological problem, it also relates to the institutional, cultural and technological elements.7. Presently, the problems that Chinese public liability accounting faces can be generalized into two problems. The first one is the lack of revolution's motivation, including internal motivation and external motivation. The second one is that the capability to run revolution is not enough.