국가재무제표의 정확성 추세에 관한 연구: 회계오류를 중심으로

Given the increasing importance of accrual-based government financial statements, this paper investigates accuracy of government reporting by utilizing accounting errors, the most intuitive and comprehensive proxy for information credibility. We conduct multilateral analyses on three types of errors: ① ‘significant errors’ which are explicitly recognized in the Statement of Changes in Net Assets, ② ‘insignificant errors’ which are hidden under sub-accounts in the Statement of Operations, and ③ changes in net assets, irrelevant with base net assets, reserves, or surplus, which practically are potential errors to be recognized in such future events as governments reorganization (hereafter ‘other net asset adjustments’). From the analytic results, we first report the amount of total errors covering all three types has shown a statistically significant downward trend from 2011 to 2014, indicating that accuracy of government financial statements has improved in appearance. However, caution is required in interpreting this outcome because the result has been driven mainly by other net asset adjustments which dominate the other two types of errors in total volume. We also find the necessity of further improvement in reporting accuracy by evidencing highly frequent material-error incidences in many central government agencies (hereafter ‘agencies’). Applying an equivalent ‘1% materiality’ criterion for the Korean financial regulatory authority to judge an accounting fraud, we show, on average, 27 agencies, 71.1% of total 38 sample agencies, have made such material errors over the sample period. Among them, 14 agencies are observed to repeat those errors every year. These results cast several important policy implications. First, clear and consistent standards are required to address inconsistent error-reporting practices across agencies; some classify less-than-1% errors as significant (fully recognized in the Statements of Changes in Net Assets), while others regard more-than-10% errors as insignificant (partially disclosed in the footnotes). Second, methods to guarantee complete disclosure of detailed information on errors should be devised. In case of other net asset adjustments, no information is given except its total amount. Insignificant errors also does not provide its entire details. Third, other net asset adjustments should be more strictly managed to further enhance information credibility due to its high portion in total error volume. Fourth, tailored guidances are necessary for agencies with highly frequent material errors because continued material errors signal possible structural problems such as lack of relevant professionals or conflicts of standards with their accounting environments. Caveats are in order. We excluded 16 agencies whose financial statements have suffered from drastic changes due to government reorganizations. So, representativeness of the sample could be challenged from the possibility of systematic difference when those agencies are included. Also, newly suggested evaluation models for aggregate samples are not free from correlated omitted variable bias. Nevertheless, such concerns are expectedly addressed with consistent results from a separate analysis on each individual agency, high explanatory power of regressions, and additional inclusion of government fixed effects. Finally, search for factors causing changes in accuracy is beyond the scope of this paper.