Scenario Assessment of Accrual Accounting Implementation Challenges: Legitimacy Sustainability Perspectives in the Public Sector

Since the beginning, accounting has had no other goal than to raise the values of accountability to the stakeholders, and the philosophy of this profession is considered to be merely improving the level of information transparency for users. This knowledge in the public sector has a more sensitive mission to respect the rights of others due to the greater awareness of the existence of stakeholders, so that with the beginning of the second half of the 20th century onwards, especially in advanced countries, accounting has accepted more responsibilities for a more comprehensive response to the stakeholders. In other words, the experts in this field, especially with the change of the social system structures of the countries, believe that the role of accounting affects the more effective interaction of the governments with the beneficiaries. Because accountability in this profession has evolved strategically and operationally due to the change in social expectations and the influence of economic/political, cultural and international conditions, these changes require the development of accounting to gain more legitimacy. It is essential in the public sector. Therefore, in this situation, the responsibility of accountability has forced the governments to explain their actions more clearly to the citizens and expose the results of the approved programs to evaluate the judgment of the independent monitoring institutions and the people to promote public legitimacy.

This study is in the applied research category regarding the results. It is considered exploratory in terms of purpose and mixed in the type of data collection. Therefore, a range of related processes and complementary analyses of the qualitative and quantitative sectors were used to determine the most likely scenarios for implementing accrual accounting and determine the most stable dimension of legitimacy in the public sector. In this study, first through content screening, an effort was made to identify similar research on the subject of accrual accounting challenges with the participation of 14 experts in the accounting field. Then, through the analysis of linkage matrices and mix-and-match, the most challenging factors in the implementation of accrual accounting were determined by conducting interviews to determine the basic themes of these factors. In the quantitative part, with the participation of 50 managers and financial experts of the General Department of the Ministry of Economy and Finance of Mazandaran province, who had the necessary experience and knowledge regarding the implementation of accrual accounting, an effort was made to determine the status of each of the solutions through a mutual evaluation matrix. The solution to the challenges of implementing accrual accounting is determined based on the separation of scenarios so that finally, based on the matrix of mathematical functions, the determination of the most stable legitimacy of the public sector based on the development of the implementation of accrual accounting in the future is determined.

The results of the study showed that the most effective matrix of accrual accounting in the General Department of the Ministry of Economy and Finance of Mazandaran province to improve the legitimacy of the public sector is the same mathematical function matrix or accrual accounting matrix as a terrarium, which can be the most desirable dimension of legitimacy, i.e. practical legitimacy create in the public sector.

In this research, the qualitative part used the theme analysis process due to the lack of integration related to identifying accrual accounting implementation challenges. According to this process, firstly, to determine the overarching themes by selecting 12 primary research, a total of 9 researches related to the present topic were selected, and during the linking matrix process, the influence and dependence of each theme were determined and then by placing each of the identified themes in According to the two factors of power of influence and power of dependency, the base of the Mi'kmaq matrix should be selected the most effective drivers of the challenge of implementing accrual accounting in the public sector. The result obtained in this study shows that the public sector needs to give priority to the development of its technological capacities to face the challenges in the implementation of accrual accounting to improve the level of holistic functions of accrual accounting in recording financial events so that it can achieve practical legitimacy by speeding up the transparency of the financial functions of the devices and institutions under the General Administration of the Ministry of Economy and Finance of Mazandaran province.