Public organizations, such as hospitals in the United States (Eldenburg and Krishnan,
2003) and SMCs (Collin, 2001) have been found to have primitive compensation systems.
This could be due to their character of being not-for-profit organizations, presumably not
having profit as a target in their management control systems. The implication is that since
the incentive system does not create a link between the top managers’ wealth and the profit
of the firm, top managers of SMCs can be expected to be less interested in reporting profit.
Finally, the threat of takeover, which could induce managers to present high profit numbers
in order to avoid a bid on the corporation (Bushman and Smith, 2001), is virtually
absent in SMCs. We would therefore expect top managers to be more prone to choose an
accounting policy that retains earnings.
The last argument is the simplest economic argument, that the usage of SASB is less
costly than the usage of SFASC, which demands more information-processing capacity (cf.
Elbannan and McKinley (2006). Thus, SMCs will prefer SASB.
Summarizing this discussion on the derivation of top managers’ interest and owners’
interest, we will expect to find a basic coincidence of interest between top managers of
the SMCs and the municipal owner’s representatives at the board of the SMCs. These two
parties will promote the use of the more conservative and less comprehensive standards of
SASB since they tend to retain earnings and be less costly to apply. The overall hypothesis,
based on ideas from PAT, is as follows: