Research On Dual Governmental Accounting System Based On Public Accountability

At present, the reform of governmental accounting is globally coming into a golden age, while the reform of Chinese budgetary accounting is attracting much attention from both Chinese authority and accounting academia. The No.15 five-year Compendium of national economy and social development passed in March 2006 has clearly suggested pushing actively the reform of Chinese governmental accounting. In order to guide the practice of the reform effectively, the research of fundamental theory of governmental accounting should be strengthened by Chinese accounting academia. Whereas accountability is the foundation of accounting existence and development, and accounting environment is the main impetus of accounting reform. The dissertation takes public accountability as the logical starting point and makes government accounting environment of China as the primary background. After profoundly analyzing the disadvantages of current budgetary accounting system, the writer put forward a set of effective governmental accounting system: dual governmental accounting.Governmental accountability differs from the enterprise's accountability, the former takes root in democracy system. In the term of entrusted object, public accountability includes accountability for public power and accountability for public resource, and the later is the objective existence foundation of governmental accounting. In other words, it is government accountability that demands governmental accounting. This viewpoint could be further explained from several other theories'perspective, such as principal-agency theory, public management, public choice and private choice, and these three demand-theory perspectives correspond to different models of governmental accounting respectively, such as control-oriented, management-oriented, and report-oriented. Besides, these different models correspond to three-level goal theory of governmental accounting raised by Chan and Li, which are fit for diverse characters of governmental accounting. According to the analysis of inside environment of our country's governmental accounting, the writer thinks that the complicated principal-agency relationship in our government is the key reason of agency's adverse selection and moral hazard in acquiring and using public resource, especially budgetary resource. Thus, we should select and build control-oriented governmental accounting. Based on the analysis of every element of outside environment, the writer believes that all kinds of outside trustors of our country'government lack enough self-identity of being a trustor, so that they need little of governmental financial information. Therefore, report-oriented governmental accounting reform should be a long-term objective. From the angle of international environment, performance and outcome-oriented accountability will be the trends, which call for economy, effectiveness and efficiency of resource usage. And management-oriented governmental accounting will be useful in improving these trends. Generally speaking, control-oriented integrated with management-oriented model should be adopted by our current reform of our governmental accounting. Then, after analyzing disadvantages of current budgetary accounting system profoundly, the writer suggests dual government accounting, which includes financial accounting and budgetary accounting, can implement the adopted governmental accounting model.Governmental financial accounting is a concrete apply of general theory of financial accounting. When constructing governmental financial accounting, two key issues should be taken into account. One is the selection of accounting object; the other is the construction of accounting entity, and there exist a big flexible selecting space in these two aspects. Government budget is a forceful and legal obligation on acquiring and using resources, so obeying government budget strictly is an important element of government accountability. Financial accounting, however, has historical characteristic, which makes financial accounting not able to overcome inside agencies doing harm to government budget. Instead, governmental budgetary could make up the shortcoming of financial accounting. According to the level of budget, governmental budgetary accounting consists of government-level budgetary accounting and expenditure organ-level budgetary accounting. And, the key of constructing budgetary accounting is setting the account according to the procedure of budgetary execution. After the research of fundamental theory of financial accounting and budgetary accounting, the writer brings forward primary suggestions on constructing dual governmental accounting in our country. Both of these two type of accounting is important content of complete governmental accounting, but they differs a lot in accountability foundation, fundamental theory, basic function, accounting basis, accounting object, accounting entity, and accounting report etc. In order to make them exert cooperation effect, some measures should be taken to harmonize financial accounting and budgetary accounting on the aspects of accounting entity setting-up, account setting, the choice of accounting basis, and arrangement of accounting report.