Public Sector Accounting Reform at Local Government Level in Indonesia

This paper describes and analyses the challenges encountered in attempting to reform public sector accounting in Indonesia, the main objective of which is to combat corruption and thus help improve governance. Our observations suggest that this reform has been seriously hindered by a lack of staff with adequate accounting skills — a problem exacerbated by the decision to continue to prepare old-style cash-based reports alongside the new accrual-based reports. Our key contribution is to demonstrate the danger of rushing to copy public sector financial management techniques from quite different country contexts, especially when there are significant differences of opinion as to the appropriate design of these reforms among the influential policy-making agencies.