Applicability of Sri Lanka public sector accounting standards: Trincomalee urban council, Sri Lanka

Though the Sri Lankan Local Governments were introduced with the accrual based Public Sector Accounting Standards from 2009 they have not been implemented yet. As a result, the present study focuses why it has been a failure and sees the applicability of the standards to the Local Governmental set up in Sri Lanka. The Urban Council of Trincomalee city was selected as the case for study and semi structured interviews were conducted. The study concludes that since the accounting system (Wickramanayake’s accounting system) already in place was based on accrual principles, the application of accrual based accounting standards are possible provided that the staffs’ professional expertise is improved to the level expected.