A PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE BETWEEN GOVERNMENTAL ACCOUNTING INFORMATION AND NATIONAL ACCOUNTING INFORMATION. The case of Italian public administrations

Since 2003, by the Maastricht Treaty the European Community started to emphasis more on the accounting and harmonization aspects. After the global economic crisis, joint with the lacking in monitoring of public finances, the European legislator issued the so-called “six pack” in which it highlighted as the availability of fiscal data, elaborated according to the ESA 95 (now, ESA2010) rules, is crucial to the proper functioning of the budgetary surveillance framework of the Union. In particular, within the six pack, the Council Directive 2011/85/EU underlines that the regular availability of timely and reliable fiscal data is the key to proper and well timed monitoring, which in turn allows prompt action in the event of unexpected budgetary developments; therefore, became necessary understand what kind of relationship exists between data derived from national systems of public accounting and statistical data In the last years, public debate in this regard has focused on the possibility to give ESA statistical information directly through the national accounting system or by a reconciliation from the accounting system data to statistical data. In Italy, through the law 196/2009 on public accounting and finance, that reformed public finances and accounting rules, the government aims to improve the link between public administrations accounting and ESA information. These target was achieved setting up a new integrated government finance statistics accounting framework, which supply a new codification of management events: the “new chart of accounts”. It is elaborated assuring an univocal correlation between the maximum level of accounts – in the context of fiscal data derived from national systems of public accounting - and the accounts considered by the ESA and it represents the response to the Directive 2011/85/EU requirements when it speaks about a reconciliation table. This paper presents the implications of an integrated accounting framework – the Italian new chart of account – through which collect different kind of information.