COMMUNICATING RESULTS TO CITIZENS: EMPIRICAL ISSUES FROM THE USA, NEW ZEALAND AND ITALIAN LOCAL GOVERNMENT REPORTING SYSTEMS

Enrico Guarini, Ph.D.

Lecturer in public sector accounting and management

Bocconi University

School of Management

Public Administration Department

Via Bocconi 8

20136 Milano, Italy

phone (+3902) 5836.6217

fax (+3902) 5836.6832

e-mail enrico.guarini@sda.uni-bocconi.it

Abstract

In recent years, the level of interest in performance measurement has hit new heights and many local governments share a strong commitment to the use of performance measures integrated into internal management systems. Because governement goals are usually not monetary, “non-financial” indicator are needed to measure and evaluate the results of services. Are these measures also used in external financial reporting practices?

The paper is concerned with examining some accomplished performance reporting practices of local governments in Usa, New Zealand and Italy in order to understand about why and how they use non-financial measures in external reporting and to identify some limits to the current state of the practice. The paper focuses on the following issues:

1) which is the overwhelming motivation to use performance measures in citizen reporting?

2) which are the information needs of different stakeholders?

3) how performance informations are reported and disclosed?

4) should some “accounting” standards be set for external performance reporting?

Some set of relevant reports are analyzed, current literature is examined, a reporting model and some principles are proposed. The proposed model conditions reporting on the type of activity and services matched with the different aspects of performance in a government entity.