Règles de comptabilité publique, droit des marchés publics et management public :Réflexions sur les dimensions économiques et juridiques du contrôle de la dépense publique

The paper addresses the connections between public accounting, procurement regulation and public management. The starting point is the poor performance of cash accounting as a way to tackle cost overruns and delays in procurement contracts. This can be explained by the specific rationale of cash accounting: as the accounting face of authorization acts, it closer to an administrative/political rationale than to an economic one: the conventional public accounting systems have been set up in order to deliver to the Parliement and administrative agencies a budgetary kind of information. The paper expands on the reasons why the public accounting information system is unsuited to public contract management. It then argue that the implementation of new procurement contracts, such as Public-Private Partnerships in a unchanging public accounting system, is a dead-end. As a matter of fact, PPP can induce additional risks if the accounting framework is unsuited. Finally, the paper explores some key issues of implementing an accrual accounting framework for both procurement and public management.