The measurement of Tangible Capital Asset in accrual based public sector financial statements. Tangible Capital Assets, even if often explaining the largest part of the resources managed by public sector reporting entities, stay outside the scope of the cash based reporting system that has long prevailed and still prevails in that sector. Therefore, when those entities have started to adopt an accrual based financial reporting system, the measurement of Tangible Capital Assets has proved to be one of the major challenge they had to afford. In the absence of a proper tradition, the measurement bases were imported from the private sector experience and literature. The work, moving from an analysis of the differences in the concept of asset in public and in private sector, discusses risks and limits of such a choice for each of the predominant measurement bases: fair value, value in use, historical cost, replacement cost. The paper then highlights the importance of using non financial data to measure and represent the value and the change in value of Public Sector Tangible Capital Assets and explains the innovative solution developed in Canadian Public Sector to combine financial and non financial data.
Accrual Accounting e Valutazione dei Tangible Capital Asset nel settore pubblico. Basi di misurazione e implicazioni sui risultati di bilancio
CAPALBO, Francesco
2011-01-01
Abstract
The measurement of Tangible Capital Asset in accrual based public sector financial statements. Tangible Capital Assets, even if often explaining the largest part of the resources managed by public sector reporting entities, stay outside the scope of the cash based reporting system that has long prevailed and still prevails in that sector. Therefore, when those entities have started to adopt an accrual based financial reporting system, the measurement of Tangible Capital Assets has proved to be one of the major challenge they had to afford. In the absence of a proper tradition, the measurement bases were imported from the private sector experience and literature. The work, moving from an analysis of the differences in the concept of asset in public and in private sector, discusses risks and limits of such a choice for each of the predominant measurement bases: fair value, value in use, historical cost, replacement cost. The paper then highlights the importance of using non financial data to measure and represent the value and the change in value of Public Sector Tangible Capital Assets and explains the innovative solution developed in Canadian Public Sector to combine financial and non financial data.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
