Suchergebnisse

In August of 1970, Congress passed an amendment to the Defense Procurement Act, Public Law 91-379, which established the Cost Accounting Standards Board (CASB). The law authorized CASB to promulgate standards to be followed by defense contractors who were awarded negotiated defense contracts of $100,000 or more. The purpose of these standards was to achieve uniformity and consistency in cost accounting practices used by contractors in determining the price the government will pay for goods and services. From 1970 to 1980, CASB issued nineteen Cost Accounting Standards (CAS) which remain in force today. This thesis will study the history and development of CASB as it relates to the defense industry as well as CASB organization, promulgation, and types of contract coverage. It will discuss and analyze the nineteen standards and provide a summary of each standard, the more important provisions, any exceptions, the effective date, and the purpose of the standard. Finally, it will address the following CAS administration requirements: the disclosure statement which requires defense contractors to provide in writing detailed descriptions of their accounting practices; noncompliance issues which are determined by the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) during the audit process; and lastly, the cost impact proposal which must be prepared by the contractor for either changes made to the cost accounting system or noncompliance. This thesis will provide insight, understanding, and practical application of the Cost Accounting Standards as they relate to contracting with the Federal Government in a defense environment.

"Managerial cost accounting is the financial and managerial tool that is used to estimate the organizational cost of products and services in business and government. In recent decades, cost accounting in the United States and other advanced industrial countries has been dominated by discussions of Activity Based Costing or ABC. While ABC can be shown to produce a more accurate estimate of cost than older and more basic types of cost accounting, ABC is not used extensively in many governments. We argue that this recent focus on ABC has stifled examination and discussion of how government cost accounting is being used and how it could be used in practice. The study of cost accounting practice reveals an important and underexplored area of financial management in government. Given the scandals that cost accounting estimates can create and that different types of cost accounting can create different estimates of cost it may be reasonable to ask whether the cost accounting exercise is worth it? Cost Accounting in Government: Theory and Applications addresses these unusual and unusually important topics through a series of studies of different government cost accounting practices. The first section of the book presents two chapters on the history and basic elements of cost accounting. The second section of the book provides further discussion and case studies of actual cost accounting practices in the main areas that cost accounting has been used in government: benchmarking the performance of government services, rate setting, grant overhead cost recovery, and cost management. The last two chapters discuss cost accounting practices in Europe and the future of cost accounting. These cases span local and federal governments and provide a much needed context to the study of cost accounting in government. Aimed at academics, researchers and policy makers in the fields of Accounting, Public Administration, and Government Studies, Cost Accounting in Government: Theory and Applications seeks to address the practical and theoretical gap in government cost accounting research with case studies of different public agencies that are using cost accounting for different purposes. The case studies illustrate that different purposes for cost accounting create unique and interesting cost accounting practices. The case studies provide useful examples of actual cost accounting systems that can inform both research and instruction"--Back cover.

Cost accounting in government is a topic that has an oddly uncertain place in public financial management. Many people know what it is as an ideal construct but do not know what it is in practice. This uncertainty of practice and strong expectations about what it should be creates a tightrope that must be consciously attended to and exacts a toll on those who study its practice. For example, activity based costing, or ABC, was generally presumed to be the state of the art for cost accounting in government (Geiger, 2010). While there has been much research about cost accounting in the context of private organizations, the literature on cost accounting in public organizations has not kept pace with its development for the past two decades, especially when many public organizations are experiencing fiscal stress and there is a renewed interest in the subject of cost measurement and containment. This thesis reviews the development of cost accounting research and practices, including the practice of a hybrid of traditional cost accounting and ABC. The research then applies transaction cost theory and a variety of contextual factors that are supported in the literature to create a theoretical model of how cost accounting is used in public organizations. The model is tested on a case study of an ABC implementation in a small city. The insights from this analysis are corroborated through the analysis of the cost accounting practices in a sample of 30 large US cities. The hierarchical logistic regression of 1122 services in these cities finds that the transaction cost variables of asset specificity and uncertainty are significant factors that influence which services get measured in the cost accounting plans. The final empirical chapter looks at why cost accounting is used in US cities and shows that fiscal stress is related to US cities using cost accounting. The last chapter draws conclusions from the current research and discusses avenues for future research.

Acknowledgements -- A framework for cost accounting systems in government / Zachary T. Mohr -- Contextualizing cost accounting in government from a historical perspective / Zachary T. Mohr and William C. Rivenbark -- The intrinsic value of cost accounting for benchmarking service efficiency / William C. Rivenbark -- Cost accounting for rates and user fees / JoEllen Pope and Zachary T. Mohr -- Cost accounting for government grants / Robert J. Eger, III and Bruce D. McDonald, III -- Cost management innovations in federal agencies / Dale R. Geiger -- Cost accounting in European countries / Ringa Raudla and James W. Douglas -- Extending the application and theory of government cost accounting / Zachary T. Mohr -- Contributors -- Author index -- Subject index