Designing and Explaining a Model of Public Purpose Financial Reporting Based on Good Governance Indicators in the Iranian Public Sector

The spread of accounting scandals has prompted the need to improve the relationship between financial reporting and the establishment of good governance structures; therefore, identifying factors and drivers such as financial reporting in the public sector that can assess the characteristics of good governance in the country is of great importance. Given the lack of an integrated, comprehensive, and coherent model in this area, the present study has presented a model for improving good governance indicators based on the components of the indigenous model of public purpose financial reporting using a mixed exploratory (qualitative-quantitative) approach. The statistical sample of this study in the quantitative part consisted of 140 experts in the field of finance in the public sector, including managers of the General Directorate of the Ministry of Economy and Finance, accountants of executive agencies, auditors of the Court of Accounts, and senior managers of the Planning and Budget Organization, as well as accounting professors with at least a master's degree and at least ten years of work experience. In the qualitative part, after conducting 15 interviews with experts, the data reached theoretical saturation. In order to collect data in the qualitative part, a semi-structured interview (record taking) was used, and in the quantitative part, a researcher-made questionnaire with 67 questions based on a five-option Likert scale was used. In the qualitative part, the Brown and Clark (2006) content analysis method was used, and in the quantitative part, the confirmatory factor analysis technique (LISREL software) was used. The presented model has seven comprehensive themes: "evaluation and monitoring of performance, organizational cooperation and interaction, transparency and prevention of corruption, rule of law and regulations, accountability system, qualitative characteristics of financial reporting, and efficiency and effectiveness of financial reporting", 19 organizing themes, and 67 basic themes. The validity and reliability of the qualitative model section were confirmed using content validity and test-retest reliability index techniques. Validity and reliability in the quantitative part were also confirmed using convergent construct validity and composite reliability, respectively. The findings of this study can provide new insights to decision-makers in the field of governance in order to improve its indicators based on financial reporting.