Public Accounting and IPSAS in Portugal： The Accounting Standardization System for Public Administrations

The Accounting Standardization System for Public Administrations （SNC-AP） was approved by Decree-Law No. 192/2015, of September 11 and constituted the new accounting system for public administrations in Portugal, which will take effect from January 1, 2017, although there were pilot entities that are already applying it in the year 2016. The reasons for the approval of these accounting regulations are presented in the approval diploma itself, the existence of a strong fragmentation and outdated accounting standardization for the public sector. This paper intends to analyze the public accounting reform in Portugal based on the SNC-AP and the impacts that it will determine in public institutions in terms of accounting in relation to the previous POC-P regime and sectoral plans as well as the resources involved in the Implementation. Likewise, it is intended to assess whether all public bodies subject to its adoption will proceed to its implementation on January 1, 2017, as planned. For this purpose, the data available on this subject will be used, in particular those of the Directorate-General for the Budget of the Ministry of Finance.

Internal Audit and Risk Analysis:The Particular Case of a Public Entity in Portugal

The purpose of this paper is to present the results obtained by an internal audit unit of a large public sector entity,in the area of education,during 2018,which we will call here Entity X and analyze the impact that developed work had in the management decisions of that entity.The methodology used in the preparation of the article is the case study,where Cervo,Bervian,and Silva(2007,p.62)define it as“research on a particular individual,family,group or community that is representative of their universe,to investigate the different aspects of life”.The theoretical framework on the theme(secondary sources)was developed from bibliographic and documentary research,which concerns the classification of procedures and are appropriate to the characterization of this study,as an instrument for collecting information on the subject in question(Gil,2006).The results obtained are related to the activity of the referred internal audit unit in 2018,which proved to be quite fruitful and are developed in points 4,5,and 6 of the paper.During the preparation of the study,some limitations were found,related to the fact that it was only possible to analyze the year 2018,thus failing to establish a relationship with the department’s activity history.In our opinion,this study is important because it allows other similar entities to verify that it is possible to carry out internal auditing in the public sector(especially in this sector of education),since this practice is not yet disseminated within the area.This study is original in that it uses real data from an internal audit body.