Workshops

The 16th CIGAR Workshop was held from 22^nd to 23^rd September 2022 in Cottbus and Berlin. The theme of the CIGAR Workshop was “Educating for Institutional Change in Public Sector Accounting?”. This was the first time that a CIGAR Workshop was dedicated to public sector accounting education.

There were 57 participants attending the CIGAR Workshop physically and 12 participants attending online.

On Thursday, 22^nd of September, Susana Jorge, Chair of CIGAR, and Berit Adam together with Jens Heiling on behalf of the Organising Committee welcomed the participants of the CIGAR Workshop. In the following opening plenary session of the CIGAR Workshop, keynote speeches were given by Christoph Reichard, by Harald Bott and Gerrit Rüdiger and by Sandra Cohen on the workshop’s main theme. They presented and discussed public sector accounting education from different perspectives, including point of views of academics and practitioners. They highlighted the challenges and complexities in providing education for institutional change in public sector accounting and prepared the ground for the following parallel paper sessions. During the parallel sessions, in total 30 papers were presented (all with discussants). About one quarter of the papers focused on public sector accounting education, followed by papers on sustainability/non-financial reporting, public sector assets and public sector accounting reforms. In one of the sessions focussing on accounting for public sector assets, Gorana Roje presented the “Efficient Public Sector Asset Management Program”, which is a multidisciplinary, regional peer learning approach to continuous public sector asset management training.

The first day of the CIGAR Workshop ended with a wonderful dinner at the idyllic-located Spreewehrmuehle restaurant. During the dinner, Giuseppe Grossi, CIGAR Board member and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Public Budgeting, Accounting & Financial Management (JPBAFM) presented the 2022 Best Paper Literati Award of JPBAFM to Emanuele Padovani, Susana Jorge and Silvia Iacuzzi for their paper on “Municipal financial vulnerability in pandemic crises: a framework for analysis” also co-authored by Liliana Pimentel.

On Friday, 23^rd of September, participants had a bus transfer from Cottbus to the Hessische Landesvertretung, located in the heart of the capital of Berlin. After welcome greetings by Martin Worms, State Secretary of the Ministry of Finance of the State of Hessen, the second plenary session with keynote speakers and panel discussions took place. Ian Carruthers, Chair of the IPSASB, provided an update and outlook on IPSAS, followed by John Verrinder from Eurostat, who shared the current status and insights about EPSAS. Last but not least, Martin Worms presented the experiences and lessons learned from the IPSAS project of the State of Hessen.

The event closed with the IPSASB Research Forum in the afternoon. Andreas Bergmann, Chair of the IPSASB Academic Advisory Group and Susana Jorge opened up the Research Forum, which was jointly organised with the CIGAR Workshop. The papers presented focused on climate change and public sector financial reporting related to sustainability, IPSAS 33 and the first-time adoption of accrual basis IPSAS and finally on the use of discount rates in public sector accounting. The IPSASB Research Forum closed with a wine reception with wines from the state of Hesse.