La contabilità degli enti locali in Europa: riflessioni sullo status quo

The aim of this chapter is to provide some food for thought on accounting recognition and reporting in European local public administrations. The chapter strives to explain what, how and why public sector accounting is changing throughout Europe, the subjects that define international accounting standards and the way they do it, as well as which are the recurring underlying problems and solutions. Accounting systems in the public sector change in accordance to the changes in the informative objectives and expectations, in turn linked to the mutated socio-economic scenario. The International Public Sector Accounting Standards Board (IPSASB) progressively engaged into the challenge to issue international accounting standards for public sector organizations, which nevertheless have found scant enthusiasm from European local public administrations, eventually due to their closeness to the private-like accounting standards. Despite there seems to be a global push towards accrual accounting, empirical evidence on its promise to provide more and better information is still to be proven.