Christine
Ryan
School of Accountancy
Queensland University of Technology
Brisbane
Keitha
Dunstan
School of Accountancy
Queensland University of Technology
Brisbane
Jennet
Brown
Department of Transport
Brisbane
Australian
public sector reforms have emphasised performance management. This has lead to
the promotion of quality annual reports as an imperative to the appropriate
discharge of accountability for government agencies. In an effort to improve
the quality of reporting, organisations in Australia have organised public
sector annual reporting awards. Despite these moves there remains considerable
disagreement in the normative literature and an absence of consistent empirical
evidence as to who uses annual reports and what their information needs are. Researchers
who have investigated the incentives for entry into annual reporting awards
have concluded that entering annual report awards provides an opportunity to
signal the quality of management. Both the normative and positive research
ignores the possibility that the value of annual reports to discharge
accountability and the value of entry in annual reporting awards may vary
depending on the type of public sector agency and on the relationships between
stakeholders. This study focuses on the Queensland public sector and the
Queensland Annual Reporting Award (QARA) and develops a theoretical model that
addresses the myriad of accountability relationships in the different types of
Australian public sector agencies. A
series of case studies of a cross section of Queensland public sector agencies
confirm that the annual report was perceived by account preparers to be an
important tool for the discharge of accountabilities. However, the perceived
value of the annual report varied for some types of public sector agencies and
for some types of stakeholders. In some cases it was thought that alternative
forms of communication provided more suitable means to discharge the
accountability demands of stakeholders. Similar differences were also found to
prevail in perceptions of the value of annual reporting rewards as a signal of
quality reporting.