THE CHALLENGES CONFRONTING PUBLIC SECTOR ACCOUNTING AND FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT: A PERSPECTIVE OF PROFESSIONAL ACCOUNTING PRACTICE IN NIGERIA

The public sector is that sector of the economy that is organised and operated by the government, to cater for the citizenry and composed of ministries, parastatals, Agency & municipal. It is distinct from the private sectors that are built on profit orientation. Public sector accounting system is unique and meant to record all financial information and transaction of government activities and transaction. It is described as a process of recording, communicating, summarizing, analyzing and interpreting government financial statement Adams (2004) and as the value of monitory operations increase, there became the need to introduce professionalism in financial reporting. This was to curb financial statement anomalies, falsification and engineering that became the other of the day in recent time of which both directors, administrators, top political personalities and professional accountants and auditors were indicated, which calls for over haul of the public sector financial administration and the need for adequate capacity building within the two major accounting professional bodies ICAN and ANAN and the recent recognition of CPA Nigeria in the sector. Chi square was used to test the validity of the research hypothesis which reveals that challenges confronting public sector has impact on financial statement which is alternative hypothesis (HI). A simple questionnaire were administered to collect data used for analysis, the study investigated the respondents on five characteristics namely Gender, Age group, Highest level of Education, Professional qualification to mention, which O cells (0%) have expected frequency of 21.8 while b. 0 cells (0%) have expected frequencies less than 5, and the minimum expected cell frequency 43.5. It was revealed that public sector accounting and financial administration has witnessed a lot of storm of financial mismanagement, maladministration, and financial re-engineering which has devastated the economy and made many citizen unemployed, hungry and unstable. It was recommend that there should be adequate capacity building with the professional accounting bodies with a good system of financial administration reform with global policy such as IPSAS backed with restructure of procedure to strengthen professional independence as to ensure accountability. JEL: H83, M41, M42, H20 Article visualizations