THE EFFECTIVENESS OF ACCOUNTING INFORMATION IN DECISION MAKING IN PUBLIC SECTOR

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY

Accounting information is a part and parcel of today’s life which is necessary to understand the accurate financial situation of the organization and used as the basis of making strategic decisions. Accounting plays a critical role in the success or failure of contemporary public institutions.

Accounting information serves as a critical tool for recording, analyzing, monitoring and evaluating the financial condition of companies, preparation of documents necessary for tax purposes, providing information support to many other organizational functions,(Amidu et al., 2011). In the context of SMEs, accounting information is important as itcan help the firms manage their short-term problems in critical areas like costing, expenditure and cashflow, by providing information to support monitoring and control.

 The range of accounting information users is a broad one, and it has different information needs, but the same quality requirements in terms of accounting information contained in the financial statements. Even if a number of criticisms and limitations can be brought and attributed to accounting information, it remains the most important substantiation source of financial decisions for most public sector corporation.

According to Ademola et al (2012), accounting information is essential to business management. It involves identification, classification, storage and protection, receipt and transmission, retention and disposal of records for preparation of financial statements.

Within contemporary economic conditions, a successful public sector controlled organisations needs a lot of reliable accounting information in order to be able to make quality business decisions (Miko, 1998). Economical information especially financial and accounting ones are the information which most public sector controlled organisations use in short term and strategic decisions and they may have most application among different variables effective in decision-making and in all types of decisions, thereby boosting productivity and profitability of the business. 

Accounting information is an ingredient in most, if not all, financial managerial decisions. In developed economies, these decisions are worth billions of dollars each year. In some cases, the decisions are lacking in quality. Consequently, if researches can improve decision making through improved information, society will benefit.

As we all know, accounting speaks the language of business as it records all transactions of an individual firm or other bodies that can be expressed in monetary terms.  Predicated on the going concept, accounting is the scheme and art of collecting, classifying, summarizing and communicating data of financial nature required to make economic decisions in a corporate organization.

Accounting information can be used to translate these different dimensions into a common financial dimension. Accounting information uses formalized categories for collecting and reporting information that creates a common language with which members of the organization can communicate. Formalization permits the transmission of information with fewer symbols and this facilitates the coordination between different functions that need to provide input to the decision-making process. However, accounting information is also an imperfect representation of the underlying decision problem, since not all aspects involved can be quantified perfectly in financial numbers (Galbraith, 1973). 

At independence, Nigeria joined the committee of nation with the hope for a better tomorrow. We were able to feed ourselves and were of course almost self-sufficient. Subsequently our hopes seemed unattainable. We seem to be going deeper and deeper into the woods. The consensus is that it has been bad for Nigeria. Any business or individual that wants to survive must make the right decision. The era of mile of thumb is gone; employing it is a sure way to fail absurdly.