Introduction to a Symposium on New Challenges for Public-Sector Accounting: IPSAS, Budgetary Reporting, and National Accounts

This special issue of the International Journal of Public Administration gathers a symposium of papers selected from those presented at the “European Group of Public Administration (EGPA)” Permanent Study Group XII Spring Workshop, happened in Lisbon in May 2014. The broad theme of the workshop—“New challenges for public-sector accounting: IPSASs, Budgetary Reporting, and National Accounts”—was chosen to promote the discussion on topics that are currently at the very heart of the worldwide debate concerning public-sector accounting (PSA) reforms, namely: Fiscal Policy and Budgetary Reporting, International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSASs) and Harmonization in PSA, Governmental Accounting and National Accounts, EPSASs and PSA in Europe, Accountability, and Consolidation. Indeed, nowadays an important debate exists within the EU about the adoption or adaptation of IPSASs (namely through European Public Sector Accounting Standards— EPSASs) by member states in order to get high-quality financial reporting by governments (European Commission, 2013; Manes Rossi, Aversano, & Christiaens, 2014). Given that the macroaccounting information (national accounts—NA), whose outputs are used to control and assess the Maastricht Treaty criteria, is derived from microaccounting (governmental accounting—GA), good-quality reporting systems for accounting at microlevel are demanded to assure debt and deficit data, among other, at accrual-based macroaccounting level (Jesus & Jorge, 2015).