BUREAUCRATIC MANAGEMENT IN PUBLIC SECTOR ACCOUNTING.

• Date: 01 September 2018
• Author: Ionescu, Luminita

1. Introduction

   Bureaucratic management is dominating the public sector in most of the European countries and it seems to develop more in the near future. Bureaucratic management is a formal system of organization based on clearly defined hierarchical levels and roles in order to maintain efficiency and effectiveness (Weber, 1968), but also a management of affairs which cannot be checked by economic calculation (Mises, 1983). Bureaucracy is growing in all European countries, usually connected with public funds, central and local administration, expenditures, administrative procedures and high level of hierarchy in the public sector (Ionescu, 2012a) and is facilitated by the mentality, the transition from an old system to the new procedures and the lack of qualified personnel in public sector accounting.

   At the beginning of 1990, most of the public servants and accountants had been working in the Romanian public sector for more than 20 years and experienced difficulties in adapting to the new technologies, computers and the Internet. Thus, they preferred to continue their work on papers and registers and to finish their reports on hard copies instead of saving data on servers and in the network. However, a particular aspect of the bureaucratic management in the public sector is the submission of financial reports prepared both electronically and manually on paper. In all public entities, all the figures are collected from documents and the financial reporting is sent electronically to the management for internal approval and subsequently to the Ministry of Finance for registration. Unfortunately, all the reports are printed and signed, then submitted on hard copy to the controllers, managers and the treasury.

   Another specific aspect of public sector accounting is the bureaucratic management culture that creates communication barriers in the public sector between public servants, accountants, managers and the general public. This research is developed based on the data collected from the open questionnaires responded by the public servants and accountants from the public sector, in order to understand better if there is bureaucratic management in public administration and their perception about the evolution of bureaucracy in public sector accounting. In general, bureaucrats coordinate people using a strong set of rules and procedures in all central or local institutions (Coyne, 2008).

   Bureaucracy is a negative phenomenon all over the world, but the lack of it will cause a general chaos and no control on the public funds. A smooth running clean bureaucracy could be a good thing, with rules and regulation enforced to keep a safe environment in each European country (Ionescu and Robertson, 2016). The bureaucratic management in the Romanian public sector is related to the old bureaucratic system, legacy of the socialist economy, based on a set of rules and procedures (Ionescu, 2012b).

2. The Bureaucratization Process in the Public Sector

   The bureaucratization process is very common for the European countries and is spreading at all levels of modern society. The bureaucrats need a minimum of efficiency to justify and to ask for a higher budget to the...