Corporate attempts at "managing" earnings have often involved the use of managerial judgment as to the appropriate event in the earnings cycle that is the critical one. In the municipal context, numerous opportunities exist to postpone or accelerate the outflow of liquid financial resources on a...

In this paper, we examine the value-relevance of local government accounting measures of financial condition from the perspective of the citizenry. The Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) has identified citizens as a primary user group for governmental accounting information, albeit...

Current municipal GAAP is geared toward monitoring the narrow notion of dollar accountability (i.e., compliance with budgeted dollar spending limits). It is argued that even with the limitation of present measurement technology, accountants involvement in municipal financial reports could play a...

The current measurement focus in municipal financial report­ing is "revenue minus expenditure" or the inflow and outflow of liquid financial resources on a modified accrual basis. One of the issues raised, in the FASB Discussion Memorandum on a concep­tual framework for reporting by...