COMPARATIVE STUDY ON THE PROCESS OF CONVERGENCE TO INTERNATIONAL ACCOUNTING STANDARDS APPLIED TO THE PUBLIC SECTOR IN BRAZIL AND PORTUGAL

Abstract

The New Institutional Sociology advocates that internal structures and procedures, including accounting, are influenced by external elements, so organizations and accounting are led to incorporate socially institutionalized practices and procedures. In this sense, we can link the convergence process to international accounting standards as the incorporation of socially institutionalized practices and procedures. Thus, researching the challenges that countries have overcome helps others to know the obstacles that the convergence process imposes. Thus, the objective of this research is to verify what were the challenges that influenced the process of convergence to international standards of accounting applied to the public sector in Brazil and Portugal. In Brazil, the challenges begin with the encouragement of greater participation of academia in the subject, from a critical point of view, accompanied by a full disclosure, followed by a greater adherence of Brazilian standards with international ones, aided by a disclosure of all assets and liabilities under the accrual basis, in addition to supporting pressures in the political and cultural fields. In Portugal, the challenges begin by encouraging the training of Portuguese accountants who will have to deal with an accounting based on principles, followed by the creation of institutional mechanisms that support pressures in the political and cultural fields, investing in the harmonization of local legislation in order to obtain greater comparability, accelerating the use of the SNC-AP in all Portuguese bodies and promoting the necessary accounting adjustments that inform the real value of the entities' assets involved in the process.