The Recent Romanian Accounting Reforms: Another Case of Cultural Intrusion?

Abstract

The fall of communism in Romania was marked by a bloody uprising against the Ceausescu regime at the end of 1989. The new governmental authorities then embarked rapidly upon a series of legislative reforms designed to develop a more market-based economy. By the end of 1991 the central accounting reform — in the shape of Accounting Law 82/1991 — was in place, although implementation of this Law took rather longer (the Implementation Decree (HG) 704/1993 required Romanian enterprises to operate under the Law from 1 April 1994). In common with other countries in Central and Eastern Europe, these reforms transformed the nature of accounting and financial reporting from one whose principal aim was ‘of providing financial statistics by enterprises for use in higher level budgets’ (Garrod and McLeay, 1996, p. 1) to one with a more complex set of objectives involving the provision of financial information to the various stakeholders in enterprises and to government for the purposes of tax assessment and the formulation of economic policy.