Strengthening Capacities in Financial Reporting in the SEE Region

Good financial information is essential for decision-making about public finances. In the last decade important new developments have taken place in the area of financial reporting. These new developments are reflected in revisions of the standards that international organizations, including the European Union and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), have established. The new developments mainly concern the comprehensiveness of reporting and the introduction of accrual concepts.

The recent learning event on “Financial Reporting on General Government and its Sub-sectors” focused on the latest developments in financial reporting and addressed the issues related to the introduction of the accrual concept in financial reporting. In this regard we discussed and compared processes of the organization of financial reporting and classification of institutional units.

We also discussed the rationale of accrual accounting reform agenda in connection to the European System of Accounts (ESA) 2010 and Government Finance Statistics (GFS) methodologies which require reporting of major expenditure and revenue items on accrual basis. In this context, participants practiced how to convert cash data into accrual data. The event concluded with a special case on country specifics in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH).

Brankica Lenić, fiscal and policy expert from BiH, explained how beneficial this workshop was for strengthening capacities in financial reporting practices in BiH. “The most beneficial part of the training was the process of consolidation and practical examples applied to BiH data. Additionally, the presentation on International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS) and accrual accounting was very helpful in order to clarify positive and negative sides of both.”

Participants confirmed that the event was well designed and that they would be able to apply the knowledge from the workshop at their work. They acknowledged that the value added of the course lied in participants from different countries in the SEE region presenting and comparing practices in financial reporting.

The workshop program was designed in close cooperation with Dirk Jan Kraan, IMF Public Financial Management Advisor for SEE and delivered by Vincent Marie, former IMF and EUROSTAT expert, Andrej Flajs and Marjana Klinar, both from the Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia, Noel Hepworth, Independent Public Policy Professional, and Stane Vencelj, from the Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Slovenia.

The workshop took place on September 22–24, 2014, in Ljubljana. You are welcome to take a look at the photo gallery on the CEF web site.