The authors analyse the effect of deregulation in the case of the removed requirement for Swedish municipalities to prepare consolidated financial accounts (CFAs) in their interim reports. The findings show  that  deregulation  led  to  a  statistically  significant, but not substantial,  reduction  in  CFAs. Municipalities  with  many  municipal  corporations tended  to  continue  preparing  CFAs.  CFAs therefore  appear  to  be  more  than a  compliance exercise, as  they  are  being  used for  monitoring and co-ordination purposes.

This chapter contributes to the understanding of how change within auditing is initiated and formed through collaboration and negotiation between FAR and other actors within the organisational field of municipal auditing in Sweden. The empirical data is based on documents and interviews with actors within and outside the audit profession. Thus, the data represents different perspectives and interests throughout the change process. The analyses show that it was different partial jolts that made the various actors feel institutional pressure to get involved in the change process. At the end of the change process, an additional partial jolt, initiated by an outside actor, facilitated and accelerated the process as it reinforced the understanding of interdependence between the actors involved.

In 2013, an accounting reform permitted Swedish municipalities to voluntarily adopt a system withaccrual reserves that was designed to increase flexibility in meeting budget requirements anddecrease regulatory incentives to engage in earnings management. However, since a system withaccrual reserves imposes potentially undesirable transparency from the perspective of politicians,it is unclear whether the (regulatory) benefits of adopting accrual reserves are perceived to exceedthe (political) costs. The authors found that municipalities with higher levels of earningsmanagement were less likely to adopt a system of accrual reserves, and they attribute this topolitical incentives to avoid transparency.

En serie händelser gjorde att SKR. FAR och Skyrev upplevde ett institutionellt tryck, vilket föranledde att de engagerade sig i arbetet med att ta fram en kommunal revisionsstandard. Att Revisorsinspektionen engagerade sig i frågan blev tungan på vågen.

Swedish local government audit has remained stable for a number of years. Political auditors are appointed to assess each local council’s work by the local council. They are assisted by professional auditors – however there is little standardisation of what audit means. The local council has considerable control over what the professional auditors do, setting out how they should be regulated, how they should be funded and what should happen in the aftermath of their reports. While the system has remained stable for a number of years, there are criticisms of how far the system advances local political accountability.

Purpose – This paper focuses on the extent to which Swedish municipalities identified and communicatedrisks due to the COVID-19 outbreak early on. The purpose of this paper is to explore to what extent thesituational factors of the COVID-19 pandemic influenced the likelihood of municipalities disclosing COVID-19information as a subsequent event in the annual reports of 2019.

Design/methodology/approach – Logistic regression models were used to estimate COVID-19 disclosure asa subsequent event. Data were handpicked from annual reports, audit reports and meeting minutes, or wereretrieved from publicly available sources.

Findings – Regression results indicate that municipalities issuing their annual report in a later stage of thepandemic, in regions with a higher number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, were more likely to discloseCOVID-19 information as a subsequent event. However, the municipal factors used to capture the risk of asevere impact of the COVID-19 outbreak were not of major importance. In line with previous research, thisstudy shows that political and institutional factors have explanatory power in predicting and explainingaccounting disclosure choices.

Originality/value – This paper contributes to research on accounting disclosures in urgent crises and on thespecific topic of subsequent events in the public sector. Few studies address subsequent events in a corporatesetting and, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, none do so in the context of the public sector. This paper alsooffers insight into how explanatory factors, previously tested under normal conditions and circumstances,influence disclosure choices in an early stage of a health crisis characterized by uncertainty regarding bothoccurrence and consequences.