Understanding the ‘Professionalisation’ of Public Sector Accounting and Auditing in Francophone Africa

The aim of the Essex Accounting Centre (EAC) research seminar series is to support our world-class research activities in five key areas: accounting and global development; capital Markets, audit, regulation & reporting; publicness and resilience, precarity, exclusion & social justice; and environment, climate change & vulnerability. The seminar series is also expected to promote inter-disciplinary research that links the work of members of the centre with others both within the university and with external institutions.

This paper aims to analyze the current structure of public sector accounting and auditing (PSAA) occupations in Sub-Saharan Francophone Africa and how these occupations are embedded in a historical inspired conception of colonial oversight post-independence.

This study is motivated by recent calls to professionalise PSAA in Africa through the development of competency framework and certification in a similar way to the private sector accounting profession. However, such prescriptions seem to be predicated on a seamless transposition of private sector professionalisation dynamics to the public sector.

We seek to challenge this assumption by documenting the current ecosystem of accounting and auditing in the Sub-Saharan Francophone African public sector. We rely on fieldwork in four countries from West (Benin, Niger and Togo) and Central Africa (Cameroon) to understand the role and positioning of the different PSAA occupational groups, and how their practices and mindsets are underpinned by their educational background, on-the-job experiences and status within the wider public sector.

The findings suggest that the distinctive features that characterize the PSAA system and practices in this region are not materially aligned to the current attempts to ‘professionalize’ PSAA practitioners in Francophone Africa. The path dependent and informalizing nature of the State in these countries, coupled with the continued use of French-style accounting processes and oversight, do not yet provide the required space for the development of a PSAA ‘profession’ in the sense that is defined in the accounting literature. The notion of the informalisation of politics also brings into focus whether local political elites really aspire to strengthen the institutionalisation of the state through more effective PSAA since this would de-facto lead to them having a reduced influence over state resources and power.