Management Accounting and Control System Changes in a Public Sector Context: a Case Study Umesh Sharma Department of Accounting and Financial Management University of the South Pacific

This paper looks at the management accounting and control system (MACS) changes in the Housing Authority of Fiji (hereafter HA) from the wider social and political dimensions. The HA has been set up to provide affordable shelter and mortgage finance for low and middle-income earners in Fiji. The subject organisation has been able to meet the demands of customers. Presently, the HA has been able to maintain a stock of its products (houses and sites) and has diversified further to provide loans of different types to its customers. Common amongst these are mortgage loans for purchase of building plots, cash loans for the buying, renovation, expansion and improvement of houses, housing loans to village communities; and development loans for other agencies providing the lowmiddle-income housing and building plots. The case study on the HA attempts to obtain an in-depth understanding of MACS in operation, with particular emphasis on the changes during the last decade. The discourse of this research, its arguments and conclusions have been constructed through an interpretive study of the HA. The data collected suggest that the wider social and institutional Structures have been influential in bringing about changes in MACS at the HA. It demonstrates that the organisational and control changes at the HA were the separation of the Public Rental Board from the HA, innovations in the Finance Division, introduction of Total Quality Management and performance measurement. The findings provided support to the three theories of Contingency, General Systems and Institutional as the data collected influenced the development of these theories. This study also reinforces the findings of other researchers claiming that the wider social, political, institutional and economic contexts govern the ways MACS operates in the organisation.