Recomendaciones

This study investigates the perception of financial managers on implementing AA and IAS in the public sector in Brazil and England. Therefore, the sampling criteria are derived after considering the following five key points:

#1. The number of local governments: the challenge was to identify a sample of local governments that would balance feasibility with reliability;

#2. The feasibility of the retrieval of the contacts information: due to the lack of standardisation in local governments’ websites, it was not always possible to retrieve information of the contacts. The study considered this challenge while determining the samples;

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#3. The feasibility of the proposed design apropos of time and funding: Brazil has almost 5,600 local governments (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE), 2012), and England more than 350 (Jones, 2004). Therefore, there was neither time nor resources to contact all of them within the interval of 5 months (maximum data collection interval). Thus, the research strategy was driven to retrieve information from a sample of governments that would not create any bias and would not affect the reliability of the study;

#4. The possibility of a biased response for a set of governments: some local governments in Brazil outsource their accounting activities to accounting offices that attend to several governments (Aquino and Cardoso, 2012). Therefore, working with a sample of municipalities whose accounting services are provided by the same accounting offices would lead towards a response bias to the opinion of a few; and

#5. The size of the compared governments: the aim was to compare governments with a same level of importance within each country. This study tried to avoid comparing the big local governments from one country to the small local governments from the other. Whenever possible, the proportional sizes of the compared governments were similar.

In Brazil it was decided to work with the States and States Capitals’ governments, comprising a total of 537 governments. In England it was decided to work with the

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The total of 53 governments comprises 27 States and 26 States Capitals. According to the 1988 Brazilian Federal Constitution, the Federal District has the legislative competency of both States and Municipalities and cannot be divided in Municipalities (Brazil, 1998, Art. 32). For this research purposes, the Brazilian Federal District was considered as a State.

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Unitary Authorities8, County Councils9, Core Cities10 and the City of London, comprising a total of 89 authorities11. The lists of the Brazilian and English local governments that took part in the study are shown as part of Appendix A. The governments that have answered the questionnaire are not disclosed due to an anonymity clause.

The first advantage of this approach is that the number of governments studied is not impractical (key point #1). Brazil has a total number of local governments of almost 5,600 (5,570 Municipalities, 26 States and one Federal District, according to figures from IBGE (2012)), that share different realities in regards of management structures (Aquino and Cardoso, 2012). Working with all of them would be impracticable as there is no centralized database with staff contact information for these governments. In addition, their websites are not standardized and in many cases they did not provide the necessary information, such as the financial office contacts.

In England, the total number of local governments is lower in comparison with Brazil (353 authorities, according to figures from the Local Government Association (LGA), distributed among Metropolitan District, English Unitary, London Boroughs, Shire

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The list of the Unitary Authorities and County Councils was obtained through the October 2012 version of the Office of National Statistics Code History Database (ONS, 2012). The Isles of Scilly, which is considered as a sui generis authority, has a population of only 2,200 inhabitants, and not all statistical bodies consider this authority as a Unitary Authority for statistical purposes – some consider it in separate. It was not included in this study.

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LGA response to a formal consultation returned 27 different Shire Counties (County Councils). The CountyCouncil.org.uk website, on the other hand, shows 28 different County Councils. The reason of the difference between both lists is Durham, considered by the last as a County Council. The present study followed LGA classification, which was in accordance with the last structural changes in English local government, occurred in 2009. Durham was part of the study as a Unitary Authority, following LGA response.

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The list of Core Cities was obtained through the Core Cities Website (2013).

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The sum of these local governments would comprise over 89 authorities, which is explained by the fact that some governments are considered to be, simultaneously, a Unitary Authority and a Core City (such as Bristol and Nottingham, for example). It is also important to consider that the Core Cities were included due to the size and importance of these governments.

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County and Shire District). Furthermore, it was possible to identify a central database12 with all local governments’ administrative information (key point #2). However, it was found that this database was not updated to reflect the latest changes in local government structures in England. Thus, just like in Brazil, obtaining the contact of the local governments’ financial managers or Section 151 Officers13

would be impracticable for all 353 local authorities.

The second advantage of this approach was that it fitted the financial resources restrictions. Hard copies of the questionnaire survey were sent to all the English governments that were part of the sample, and it would have been too expensive to sample all local authorities. Similarly, the number of interviews in Brazil and England needed to be restricted due to time and funding limits (key point #3).

A third advantage was that the local governments studied in each country belonged to groups for which it was possible to retrieve information within the time constraints (key point #2). Brazil has one specific group of the regional authorities, called Grupo de Gestores de Finanças Estaduais – GEFIN (acronym in Portuguese for Group of Managers of the States’ Finances) and one specific group of municipalities that are States’ Capitals, called Associação Brasileira das Secretarias de Finanças das Capitais – ABRASF (acronym for Brazilian Association of Finance Secretariats of the States’ Capitals). For both groups of governments there is an updated list of contacts that could be used in the research. For England, it was also possible to identify all the

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LGA recommended using a private service that collects data from all the UK local governments, called public-sector.co.uk. This service has databases that can be freely consulted in order to obtain different information about the public sector, such as suppliers, authorities and staff.

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The Section 151 Officer is a formally nominated officer responsible for the local authority financial affairs administration. It was established by the Local Government Act 1972 (Section 151), which says that ‘every local authority shall make arrangements for the proper administration of their financial affairs and shall secure that one of their officers has responsibility for the administration of those affairs’.

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necessary contacts for the 89 studied governments through the public-sector.gov.uk service, indicated by LGA. However, it was considerably time consuming as this database was not completely up-to-date. So, more than one contact option had to be used.

A fourth advantage was that all Brazilian governments that took part on the research had their own accounting departments/offices. This is different to many of the Brazilian smaller local governments, which usually outsource their accounting activities (Aquino and Cardoso, 2012) to private accounting offices that attend several municipalities. So, this approach favoured the non-biased responses towards the opinion of a few, once the contacted staffs were not the same for the sample of local governments contacted (key point #4).

Finally, the size of the governments studied was reasonably similar (key point #5). The Core Cities comprise some big local governments that could be compared to the Brazilian States’ Capitals. The City Councils and Unitary Authorities, due to its regional importance and size, can be compared to the Brazilian State’s Capitals for this research purposes.

The only disadvantage found in this approach was that the number of governments was slightly different (key point #1): 53 and 89 Brazilian and English local governments, respectively. Although the data collected would be statistically analysed, this difference could make the research unbalanced. So, it was considered excluding one of the English groups of governments from the research, such as the Core Cities. However, even though that would create a more balanced number of governments to be compared between the two countries, it would have excluded

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relevant governments from the research. So, it was decided to keep working with all the previous selected governments. It proved later to be appropriate, as the response rate to the survey was smaller in England than in Brazil, so that the number of responses turned out to be similar.