Promoting Accountability in Municipalities

Abstract

Local government financial reporting reforms in Australia in the late 1980s and early 1990s were promoted on the basis of usefulness for decision making and for enhanced accountability purposes. Persistent criticisms of these reforms continue to be made, including those made by councillors and other ratepayers who often appear to find such information to be too narrow, too complex and often bewildering. A case is made for rethinking the present mentality, requirements and practices, especially with respect to the contrived recognition of ‘community assets’. Instead, an emphasis is placed on advancing broad‐scope accountability and meaningful financial reporting. To this end, the disclosure of a set of factual, reliable and interpretable indicators is proposed to enable a broader, more functional notion of accountability to be applied in Australian local government within prevailing social and organisational contexts. This contribution seeks to present a series of views, questions and proposals that are strictly concerned with ‘promoting accountability in municipalities’ (PAM).

Managing Performance at Local Government Level: The Cases of the City of Brisbane and the City of Melbourne

“…Accountability is facilitated through the specification of goals, their treatment as planned targets and by matching results with plans (Holzer and Kloby 2005). It implies wider perspectives including non‐financial not just financial information (Carnegie 2005). As these aspects are found in the local governments studied, it is possible to affirm that these two local governments have improved their accountability, one of the key objectives of public sector reforms.…”

Public Wi‐Fi provision by Australian local government authorities

“…The absence of data generated by PWF networks themselves—so‐called metadata associated with network use—is a gap in our evidence base. As we discuss below, the difficulty of accessing network metadata not only highlights a methodological challenge for researchers in this relatively new field of inquiry, it raises long‐standing questions of transparency and accountability in public administration, a persistent theme in this journal (Argyrous, ; Carnegie, ; Quinlivan, Nowak, & Klass, ; Stafford & Stapleton, ).…”

Voluntary Narrative Disclosures by Local Governments: A Comparative Analysis of the Textual Complexity of Mayoral and Chairpersons’ Letters in Annual Reports

“…For example, information in the annual report may be presented in a format too complex for an external user, the reports may not be directly available and accessible to potential users, and the content of the report may not contain all the relevant information that users seek (Priest, Ng and Dolley 1999). There is a widespread perception amongst both the users and preparers of local government annual reports that the reports are difficult to read and provide less than meaningful information (eg, Butterworth, Gray and Haslam 1989; Kinnersley and Fleischman 2001; Ryan, Stanley and Nelson 2002; Walker 2002; Carnegie 2005; Montondon and Marsh 2005). Studies have contended that local government financial reports have evolved in response to the needs of managers or internal users instead of the needs of external users (Jones et al 1985; Bishop 1997[cited in Priest, Ng and Dolley 1999]).…”