공공기관 구분회계제도 구축을 위한 이론적 틀 = A Theoretical Framework for the Establishment of Separate Accounting Systems in the Publicly-owned Organizations

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The government has pursued so called normalization of publicly-owned organizations and tried to introduce, among others, separate accounting systems in an effort to enhance their financial soundness. The purpose of introducing separate accounting systems is to identify the causes of debts by separating debts according to their causes and thus effectively control and manage debts. Separate accounting systems have recently been introduced for 7 organizations for a demonstrational purpose and will be further introduced for other publicly-owned organizations. It is hoped that separate accounting systems will have diverse uses including debt management, the calculation of costs for rate-making, the evaluation of efficiency by sectors(units), and performance evaluation. The government has set up 「a guideline for separate accounting systems」, which the 7 organizations should follow, but the guideline does not contain a framework for separate accounting systems and specific details, and thus seems not to be able to play a role of a guideline. For this reason, the 7 organizations had too much discretion in applying the guideline, which resulted in the low level of uniformity and comparability. Since, apart from other regulatory accounting systems, a separate accounting system has the identification and management of debts by relevant sectors as its purpose, it mounts theoretical as well as practical challenges and requires an active role for accounting academia. An establishment of appropriate systems requires a development of new methods, based on the background knowledge in the areas of accounting practices in the publicly-owned organizations and management accounting. In this context, this study discusses and provides a theoretical framework for appropriate separate accounting systems. Especially, methods of separating statement of financial position, reflecting internal transactions, and expressing debts by relevant sectors are dealt with. This study contributes to the theory of regulation as well as organizational control in decentralized firms. The theoretical framework provided in this study is, as far as the author knows, is the first attempt to set up separate accounting systems utilizing the relationship among assets, liabilities, and equity. It also provides a useful regulatory tool with which more effective performance management and control of a regulated firm in a single entity becomes feasible without forcing functional or structural separation, since separate accounting systems enable to achieve stronger separation than existing accounting separation. The author believes that this study contributes to a new theoretical development for separate accounting systems, improvement of the existing systems of 7 organizations, and a proper introduction of separate accounting systems in the remaining publicly-owned organizations.