Divergências normativas de múltiplos fóruns de accountability: estratégias contábeis e fiscais nas prestações de contas de municípios

Abstract

The Brazilian National Treasury (STN) and the Audit Courts are stakeholders with a legal mandate to demand accountability from municipalities. At the same time, these stakeholders have a social mandate to validate the content of the standards. As a result, accountability is required, many with the same scope, however, with differences of understanding. In this context, the present research analyzes how the accounting and fiscal practices of municipalities are affected by the context of multiple accountability forums with conflicting expectations. The research follows an inductive method through an interpretive approach, with the use of semi-structured interviews with accountants, lawyers and consultants involved in the execution and accountability of Municipalities. Respondents were selected from municipalities that are exposed to different fiscal pressures, using snowball. As a result, the research argues that the differences do not go unnoticed among municipal managers who perceive the norms with low legitimacy, which arises given the divergence of understandings by the stakeholders who should validate their content. Among the consequences caused by the low legitimacy of the rules, the research identified effects of decreasing the quality of accounting information, rework in the rendering of accounts, risk of not reaching the constitutional indexes for some stakeholder and spaces for interpretations typical of the municipalities. The divergences allow room for those responsible for reporting information in the municipalities to use the context strategically and “play” with the rules. In this way, the municipalities identify the divergences or previous decisions of the stakeholders and anticipate moments of accountability for the registration and reporting of accounting and tax information, ensuring the approval of their accounts or the non-application of penalties. The results contribute empirical results to the normativity literature, and have direct implications for the discussion of the quality of accounting information. The existence of multiple forums with conflicting expectations would hamper the decision-making of municipal managers due to invalid and duplicate information. It has implications for the current context of overlapping data collection systems, which have been created by different stakeholders, often requesting the same information, such as SIOPS, SIOPE, SICONFI and Courts of Auditors, and it has implications for the research that analyzes the opinions of the Courts of Auditors as outputs of their activities.