Komponentavskrivning. Varför tillämpar kommuner det på olika sätt?

Abstract

Accounting for Swedish municipalities has gone through extensive changes over the past 15-20 years. At first accounting for Swedish municipalities was voluntary but that changed when the new legislation regarding accounting came in 1998. At the same time the Council for Municipal Accounting was established to guide the accounting units to reach good accepted accounting principles. Recommendation 11.4 is one of many regulations that the council has produced. 11.4 proclaims that municipalities are going to implement component depreciation instead of nominal linear depreciation. Recent data from the counsil shows that many municipalities has failed to implement this with noncompliance. The purpose of this study is to explain why this regulation is applied with diffrences between municipalities. I am going to do so with the help of positive accounting theory and institutional theory combined with recent studies in the same field. In contrast with these studies this one is going to rely on fieldstudies instead of statistic methods. To collect data I have chosen to investigate ten municipalities and perform an interview with a member of the projectgroup that works with the transition. By doing so I’m going to approach the problem from a different perspective and this generates my contribution to the ongoing learning about accounting choice in Swedish municipalities. I have converted previously empirical studies to eight different assumptions that can explain why recommondation 11.4 is implemented with variety. The result reveals that the diffrences depend on the officials ability to adapt to the new legislation. Another explanation is that Swedish municipalities depends on how others implement the transition. Also that the lack of sancions in public accounting may result in a slow adoption.