Accountability has been on the government agenda during the last decades. Stakeholders’ pressing requests of information that once where not even allowed to be diffused is growing, as is attention on performance and accountability of the public sector in many countries. In Wales, United Kingdom, Spain, Australia, Malaysia, Italy, scholars have investigated what is the real value to the public and the real level of accountability of annual reports (1). Annual reports are considered the main mechanism used to trasmit information on public organizations and to fulfill their accountability obligations (2). Starting in mid eghties, there has been a growing pressure towards universities for a deeper accountability of their behaviour and their performance (3).
RQ: Are annual reports communicated so that the stakeholders will be able to deduce useful information to evaluate the public organization?
The research has been designed exploring, on one side, the information on the university website, while, on the other side, submitting to the state universities a questionnaire concerning the communication of the annual report. Results show that the annual report is essentially for intern and that is communicated mainly to comply to the legislation on transparency of public organizations.
The opportunities of real opening that the current legislation gives will be taken if public organization will stop acting just to comply with the current legislation but will interiorize the culture of transparency, creating an accountability circle. But are we sure annual report, essentially a technical document, is the proper accountability mean?
This research collects datas of 50% of the entire population of italian state universities, contributing to literature presenting results that could be useful to policy makers when planning a renewal process to enforce accountability in public organizations.
REFERENCES
1.Blanco, Huguette, John Lennard, and Sylvain Lamontagne. "Annual Reporting and Accountability by Municipalities in Canada: An Empirical Investigation*." Accounting Perspectives 10.3 (2011): 195-224.
2.Nelson, Morton, William Banks, and James Fisher. "Improved accountability disclosures by Canadian universities." Canadian Accounting Perspectives 2.1 (2003): 77-107.
3. Dixon, Keith, David Coy, and Greg Tower. "External reporting by New Zealand universities 1985–1989: Improving accountability." Financial Accountability & Management 7.3 (1991): 159-178.
