The Determinants Of Government Financial Reports Online

Abstract

The disclosure of financial documents can be extremely significant for improving information transparency as part of the management of financial resources to render public sector services. Therefore, this research focuses on the role played by new technologies in this respect, particularly in promoting the transparency of financial information documents and on the key determinants to make financial documents available on the World Wide Web. To achieve this aim, an empirical test is made of models we propose, to discover whether the national websites of OCDE countries are using the Internet to provide citizens with governmental budgetary transparency and whether this disclosure is influenced by socio-economic factors. The results of the study confirm that factors previously found to be important in paper-based reporting, such as education level, population, internet access or fiscal pressure seem to have no influence on the public financial information disclosed on the Internet. Only debt seems to be a relevant factor in the degree of information transparency achieved via the Internet for accountability documents.