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Editorial: IPSASB and academia: a promising co-operation

Transition from a cash to an accrual basis of accounting and reporting widens the boundary of public sector financial reporting and therefore increases the completeness and the usefulness of its outputs. The inclusion of long-neglected non-financial items— either measured at cost or at a current valuation— results in a completely new set of information that allows both users and preparers a much wider perspective to assess public sector entities’ performance. But such a transition requires addressing important cultural, organizational and technical changes and challenges. Among them, measurement issues have significant implications for both public sector organizations’ accountability, and for decision-making (Capalbo et al., 2014; Lapsley, 1980). The selection of one or more measurement bases from the options developed by theory and practice will affect the nature and the usefulness of the information the financial statements will be able to produce. Each measurement basis supports a different concept of income and wealth which affects the meaning of the figures in the financial statements— the choice of measurement basis is critical in determining the message the preparer wishes to convey to users. Moreover, the selection of measurement bases is likely to affect the behaviour of the phenomena under measurement because, as long acknowledged in the accounting literature (Solomons, 1978), measurement results and decisional behaviour are strongly interdependent (American Accounting Association, 1977). Stark evidence of such interdependence can be found in the political interference that the European Commission (EC) exercised to relax fair value accounting rules during the financial crisis of 2008, on the assumption that write-downs due to falling market prices might deplete bank capital and set off a downward spiral. Despite the importance that measurement has in the transition from cash to accrual accounting, the academic public sector accounting literature has not devoted much attention to the topic. In addition, compared with the private sector accounting literature, studies on the application of the various measurement bases in the public sector have been extremely limited. In its Conceptual Framework (CF), the International Public Sector Accounting Standards Board (IPSASB) requires that measurement bases be selected in a way that ‘that most fairly reflect the cost of services, operational capacity and financial capacity of the entity in a manner that is useful in holding the entity to account, and for decision-making purposes’ (IPSASB, 2010). While this has clarified IPSASB’s perspective on the objectives of public sector measurement, many issues remain unsolved, especially insofar as the application of the measurement bases listed in the CF is concerned. That this is an area where the IPSASB especially needs the support of academic research became very clear when the IPSASB started its measurement project and began to look at the issues of accounting for heritage, for infrastructure assets, and for natural resources.