Organization of Management Control in Public Institutions in Poland

The Act on Public Finance of 27. August 2009 redefined control processes in the Polish public sector. There appear doubts, however, whether the regulation brought indeed management control systems (MCSs) of public institutions closer to those of a corporate world. The paper investigates to what extent MCSs provide public managers with information useful for decision making purposes and how the systems stimulate information flow between managers and employees. The research was based on information collected in 2010/2011 from 81 public organisation, with the most recent data from the second edition of the project. The results obtained enabled to notice certain limitations in effectiveness of management information flow in the public sector. In many cases performance reporting was limited to annual summaries or no internal reports were produced (17.3% and 18.5% of cases respectively). Employees in 17.3% of analysed institutions reported also a lack of post-control feedback. However, it became visible that information sharing has grown into importance between 2010 and 2014. The paper analysed also whether such components of MCS as: control, planning and IT support influenced effectiveness of managerial information flow. Only planning turned out to be irrelevant to internal information flow