The Popular Financial Reporting between Theory and Evidence

The main international accounting associations have identified Popular Financial Reporting (PFR) as a decision making tool to increase accountability and transparency as a possible decision lever coherent with the New Public Governance theory. The study ha s focused its attention on the features and contents of the PFR identified in the literature and present through the analysis of the 193 PFRs municipalities presented at the PFR Awards Program 2017. The analysis of the presence and absence of some characte ristics confirms that the reality does not reflect the theoretical request, moreover the statistical analyzes carried out confirm various hypotheses related to the PFR but reject others such as the criterion of document length. The correlation between soci o economic characteristics of the population and the groupings of characteristics of each PFR The study confirms a relationship between document length and level of education, and between percentage of non native English speaking residents and number of a ppaerance features. To the 23 observable criteria, additional possible ones are added which, based on logic and empirical evidence, will have to be studied to assess their impact in terms of transparency and accessibility.