The transition to IPSAS in Morocco: Towards a new public finance management approach

Abstract

In the face of the evolution of public management professions, states are obliged to question their management practices, particularly those of public sector accounting. Morocco, as an ambitious country, is also concerned by this change, which has prompted it to place the accounting reform inspired by international standards IPSAS at the center of its major concerns, with a view to making this project a real leverage transparency, performance and good governance, thus guaranteeing the beginning of a new stage in the process of modernization of Moroccan public finances. Morocco adopted International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS) in 2012, making it the first Arab country and the third African country to join the IPSAS Board. A variety of studies have been conducted on IPSAS, both in South Asian countries (Adhikari and Mellemvik, 2010) and in Switzerland (Bergmann, 2012), Colombia (Gomez and Montesinos, 2012) and Jordan (Alsharari, Mohamed, 2013). However, this field of study in Morocco is characterized by the virtual absence of research, except for a few articles, qualitative research thus proving to be the most suitable for our study. To this end, the purpose of this article is to provide a theoretical framework to enrich the theory on the adoption of IPSAS in Morocco as well as to highlight the particularities of these standards while analyzing the context and the challenges of adopting these standards in the context of the Moroccan accounting reform. Theoretical findings revealed that IPSAS standards are not widely studied in Morocco, and require a considerable effort from researchers.

Keywords: Public management, accrual accounting, accounting harmonization, international public sector accounting standards IPSAS, Moroccan accounting reform

Classification JEL: H8, H83.

Paper type: Theoretical Research.