GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTING EDUCATION FOR UNIVERSITY UNDERGRADUATES

Abstract

During the last ten years, inspired by New Public Management (NPM) concepts, significant changes have been brought to the Romanian public sector. These changes concerned organization, functioning mechanism, concepts, management, as well as its financial-accounting system. Under this new approach, the university education system should be constructed so that it can correlate competencies and abilities of future graduates to the dynamics of the public administration sector. The questionnaire-based research conducted in this paper concerns the investigation of future graduates/ accounting professionals’ perception on the following aspects: public administration sector, government accounting discipline and connection between university curricula and the labor market requirements. The empirical research results have evidenced the following issues: (1) the students’ option (choice) for employment in public administration depends on their opinion on this field and the preponderance of certain disciplines in the undergraduate program’s curricula; (2) the undergraduates’ employment status does not influence their opinion on public administration; (3) the difficulty of transactions’ accounting recognition in government accounting requires a greater volume of time in the curricula.

Keywords

• public administration
• undergraduate students
• government accounting education.