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The future of EU public sector accounting in a global context

An ICAEW discussion paper to help generate a broad consensus on how to achieve reform of public sector accounting across Europe by 2025.

Our discussion paper seeks to encourage a broad consensus among both public and private sector stakeholders to assist the reform of public sector accounting across Europe. It does so by setting out a vision on how this reform could be achieved by 2025, based around three policy recommendations. We invite all interested stakeholders to comment on this paper.

We are launching this initiative to create a positive momentum in favour of Europe-wide reform. Specifically, our aim is to ensure that the exercise initiated by Eurostat in 2011 to draw a positive legacy from the financial crisis through an improvement in the quality of public sector financial information and management is brought to a successful conclusion in the public interest.

ICAEW recommendations for stakeholder comment:

  1. Require true and fair public sector reporting by 2025.
  2. Recognise the need for proportionate and tailored member state implementation.
  3. Build effective institutions and governance for global influence, EU oversight and enforcement.

Contribute to the reform of public sector accounting

We hope this paper will stimulate focused debate on how to achieve reform of public sector accounting in Europe, in a way which can get us closer to the achievement of global public sector reform based on comparable standards. We anticipate that the testing of our recommendations will not only lead to comments but also to additional suggestions − which will be very welcome.

We encourage all public and private stakeholders to provide feedback. In particular, we believe that the following groups may have a major interest in public finance issues in Europe:

  • EU and national policymakers and stakeholders;
  • regional and local stakeholders;
  • financial markets stakeholders, such as banks, investors and rating agencies;
  • national, regional and local audit institutions;
  • national and international standard setters and regional groupings;
  • academics;
  • civil society group/NGOs; and
  • finance professionals

We welcome all your comments and observations on the issues and questions raised in this paper. We would particularly welcome receiving feedback by 31 March 2017.

You can email us at reformpublicsector@icaew.com or call us on +32 (0)2 230 3272.