Formats for primary Financial Statementes of City Council: An International Comparison

Summary Principles of completeness, accuracy, clearness, simplicity and brevity should characterize internal and external communications of local authorities under a customer oriented government. In this context a good social-financial information management is essential, whereas by the entity is held by citizens in relation to optimal use of resources. So the statements of economic capital has a significant value after long time inopportune “exclusion”, in same States, considered less significant than the cash flow reports. The paper also considers the developments, and especially the challenges resulting from international accounting standards that do not provide a scheme of hard budget private companies and local authorities, with the doctrine and practice the problem of finding the form, structure and content that could qualify the statement of accounts in a transparent and digest, while synthetic. In this outcome is reached even through reflections on the evolution of temporal patterns and comparisons reporting “space” with respect to many foreign situations. Finding and comparing formats of financial statements among themselves and with the Italian experience is the central subject of the paper. Having overcome the difficulties guessed, including linguistic, empirical research is the experiences of Anglo-Saxon countries and different cultural matrix. For each fact, where possible, notes on the asset-pressed to organizational, administrative and public as well as brief description of the geographical, historical and socio-economic conditions of the city before proposing the statements made by the municipalities listed. Through time, the financial reporting formats of companies and local authorities were subject to change due to evolution of accounting doctrine, discipline and principles: they focus - even if at different times - on homogeneous models, while certain foreign trends put tendencies to comparability in jeopardy. However recent, prompt radical changes may meet understandable oppositions within the institutions. On the horizon, then, further possible problems connected to the new role of companies and authorities in a “glocal” society that will probably expect elaborate information in new economic backgrounds that mediate demands of globalization and localization. Specific contribution of the paper: - Explains, summarizing the evolution of the italian doctrine on domestic plans, forms and structures of economic and capital accounts of local authorities, sometimes comparing them with those of firms; - Underline the Italian experiences compared with those of some foreign nations; - Verify the trends derived by IPSAS; - Assumed effects of new accounting procedures for collecting and reporting. Methodology: literature review and empirical research.