Does political motives affect local government financial statement quality

Abstract

This study aims to analyse the effect of political motives on the quality of local government financial statements (LGFS) in Indonesia. As a public institution, local governments need to increase transparency and accountability by producing high quality financial statements. The LGFS quality is measured using qualitative characteristics while political motives are measured by percentage of opposition member in the legislative, meanwhile, the election year and re-election chances are used as moderating variable. To test the hypothesis, two sample groups were used. The first group of all selected local governments between 2016 and 2017 while the second group are the local governments that have conducted an election. The results showed that political competition had positive effect on LGFS quality while election year together with re-election chances strengthened the positive effect.