During the last decade the public sector has been affected by the introduction of significant reforms in the public accounting system in the international context.
During the reform process different countries have put into practice numerous intermediate variants between the extremes of cash and accrual budgeting and accounting. The reasons for the different national systems may be due to the culture, the historical background or the structural elements of these countries. Also the specific objectives and the principal users of the financial reporting, the financial resource suppliers and the influence of public accounting regulatory bodies imply different national accounting systems.
In the Western democracies there are two main broad styles of public management: Anglo-American and European Continental types.
The paper presents the United Kingdom accrual accounting model adopted in the public higher education institutions (an Anglo-Saxon country) by comparison with the Romanian one (a Continental European country). In this paper there will be taken into account some case studies of two public higher education institutions: one from United Kingdom and the other from Romania.
The paper tries to emphasize the differences and the similarities between the two countries accounting systems as well as the lessons learned from the United Kingdom accounting system regarding the implementation of the accrual accounting in the higher education institutions.