CGA-AGRC Concludes Year With Very Successful Public Lecture

The CGA-Canada Accounting and Governance Research Centre (CGA-AGRC) – a collaboration between the Telfer School and the Certified General Accountants Association of Canada that supports research in accounting and related fields – concluded the year with a public seminar by well-known public accounting expert Noel Hyndman of Queen's University Management School, Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Professor Hyndman presented “Public Sector Reforms: Changing Contours on an NPM Landscape”. Previous studies suggested that, over the last decades, public-sector accounting has moved from Public Administration to New Public Management ideas, and more recently, towards a New Public Governance approach. Those systems are often presented as mutually exclusive and competing, and Hyndman’s study, focusing on accounting changes in the UK government starting from the 1990s, tells a different story. An extensive document analysis showed that “the political debate continues to predominantly utilise New Public Management arguments, with the three systems viewed as containing complementary, rather than competing schemes.” Hyndman said his evidence pointed to “layering, rather than replacement of ideas.”

This was the last seminar of 2013 for the CGA-AGRC Distinguished Speakers series and the Centre’s executive director, Daniel Zéghal, FCGA, used the occasion to acknowledge the continued support of CGA Canada, represented at the event by Elena Simonova, and longtime CGA Ontario supporters Lilian Goh, FCGA, Paul Faulkner, FCGA, and Jean Laporte, FCGA.