XBRL LANGUAGE: SUPPORT TO CONSOLIDATE ACCOUNTS IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR

Abstract

In the “New Public Management” context , in which  public organisations and institutions are required to adopt management model practices, based on economy, efficiency and efficacy criteria, it is important to obtain information, prepared so as to allow  for the decision-makers to have a global point of view of the public sector. Thus, the accounting information system shall allow the receipt of consolidated information in order to meet the growing needs of information which, in Portugal, are underlying to  State Financial and Management Reform, enforced in our country in 1990. The accounts’ consolidation in the public sector poses several challenges, which include the definition of the consolidation model (theory underlying the consolidation; the delimitation of the entity concept, consolidation goals, users of consolidated information and the consolidation process), the integration, effectively, of several existing systems in the public administration and the resolution of problems which arise from different interpretations, in several geographic zones of laws and regulations that guide the accounting process To answer the challenges posed by the great variety of systems in the public administration (between different entities or even within the same entity) we propose the use of the XBRL demarcation language. This language is a dialect of the XML markup (eXtensible Markup Language).