Public Sector Reform in New Zealand: The Progress of Tertiary Education Annual Reports, 1990 ? 92

Popular Financial Reports as Fiscal Transparency Mechanisms: An Assessment Using the Fiscal Transparency Index for the Citizen User

“…The purpose and characteristics of each component area are discussed below. As applied to the popular reports analyzed in (Alt et al, 2002) U.S. state budget processes Budget processes 9 Transparency Index (Justice et al, 2006) U.S. state and local government websites Provision of financial information 7 Modified Accountability Disclosure Index (Coy et al, 1994) Annual reports issued by universities in New Zealand Overview 26 Service performance Financial performance Physical and financial condition Public Accountability Index (Coy & Dixon, 2004) this study, the index includes 23 criteria for both the PAFR and CCR, plus an additional criterion for PAFR and two additional criteria for CCR. These additional criteria, which are unique to the different types of PFRs, reflect the different PFR award criteria of the respective professional organizations that support each type of PFR as well as address the concerns raised in the extant literature.…”

“…To start, the Public Accountability Index (PAI) by Coy and Dixon (2004) is intended to "measure quality of university annual reports from a public accountability perspective" (p. 81) and emphasizes public accountability as the comprehensive reporting to social, economic, and political stakeholders of information on conditions, performance, activities, and progress. The PAI, which builds on the Modified Accountability Disclosure (MAD) index (Coy et al, 1994), has been used to analyze annual reports issued by New Zealand universities. Both the PAI and MAD indices serve as building blocks for our fiscal transparency index since the concept of public accountability is closely related to transparency, as the latter is about open disclosure to public stakeholders, justice, truth, and fairness in reporting (Coy & Dixon, 2004).…”

“…There is a small body of research that examines public sector annual reporting more broadly, including the financial component of such reports, but these studies, by applying disclosure indices to analyze annual reports, have largely focused on the extent that these reports contribute to broad accountability. Furthermore, the existing research has almost exclusively been conducted in the non-U.S. context, such as New Zealand universities (Coy & Dixon, 2004;Coy, Tower, & Dixon, 1994), Canadian universities (Nelson, Banks, & Fisher, 2003), and Australian local governments (Ryan, Stanley, & Nelson, 2002). Our study is unique in that we focus on a specific aspect of accountability, fiscal transparency, by concentrating on a specialized type of report, popular financial reports, issued by local governments in the U.S. Our research adds to the body of knowledge on disclosure indices by identifying broader, citizenfocused criteria of fiscal transparency and developing a FTI-CU for assessing popular reports.…”

Recipients of Public Sector Annual Reports: Theory and an Empirical Study Compared

“…These changes are identified and discussed by Coy, Tower & Dixon (1994) and Dixon et al (1995). They identified several reasons for the changes, the most critical one being the legislation (Public Finance Act of 1989; Education Amendment Act of 1990).…”

“…The findings in Table 3 were compared to those from an earlier analysis of 14 TEIs' report distribution lists (Coy et al, 1994). The distribution lists incorporated the some 130 reports which every TEI provided to the Ministry of Education for forwarding to every one of the 99 Members of Parliament.…”