Determinants of Budgetary Slack Creation: A Study in Malaysian Local Authorities.

Sharina Tajul Urus,Tuan Zainun Tuan Mat,Sharifah Nazatul Faiza Syed Mustapha Nazri,Fadzlina Mohd Fahmi,Nur Shahirah Adilah Mohd Sairazi

doi:10.32861/jssr.spi5.1040.1050

Abstract

Local authorities are responsible in allocating the resources provided by Federal Government through budget allocation process. The effectiveness and efficiency of local authorities in utilising the resources is determined by the way they manage the public funds. It is important for the local authorities to have a high degree of accountability in order to gain public trust. Managerial behavioural issues such as budgetary slack could affect the effectiveness of the budgeting process. This study aims to examine the influence of budgetary practices, specifically budget participation, budget emphasis and budget control, on the budgetary slack creation in Malaysian Local Authorities. 200 questionnaires survey were randomly distributed in January 2017 to employees that involved in budget preparation from 99 local authorities located in Peninsular Malaysia, and 109 were responded (54.5%). Hypotheses for this study were analysed using simple linear regression. Results show that budget participation, budget emphasis and budget control influence budgetary slack creation among the Malaysian local authorities. This indicates that the propensity of the subordinates to create budgetary slack increases when subordinates have influenced and involved in the budget setting as well as the use of budget in evaluating performance. High involvement and control in budgeting process, provides opportunity to manipulate the budget. The findings in this study contribute to the public sector management accounting literature in the area of budget in Malaysian local authorities. This study could assist the local authorities to enhance their budgeting system and practices.

Highlights

The measurement for this study was adopted from the study conducted by Zulkefli et al (2016b) that consist of training and development (11 items), recruitment and selection (10 items), internal control policy (8 items)
The measurement for corruption risk adapted from OECD and U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre (2015) that consists of 10 items
The results show that all the four constructs, which are training and development, recruitment and selection, internal control policies, and corruption risk are all valid measures of their respective constructs based on their parameter estimates and statistical significance (Chow and Chan, 2008)

Summary

Introduction

Development of country leads to large infrastructure construction projects along with complexities and uncertainties (Guo et al, 2014). As such the risks of corruptions and misconducts are more prevalent. According to the president of International Transparency (TI) Malaysia, training and development, recruitment and selection, and internal control policies are the factors that will lead and improve the corruption risks in Malaysia (Akhbar, 2015). The success of the organization and human management, depends on the effectiveness of human resource practices such as the effectiveness of training and development programs, good recruitment and selection structures and processes and the effectiveness of internal controls

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion