Heritage assets from a user needs perspective: A comparative analysis between Italy and Flanders

The research aims at investigating and comparing the information needs about heritage assets of Italian and Flemish users of governmental financial reporting. The paper focuses on these two European countries because they can be considered as a prototype of the countries with Roman roots rich of history, art and culture; moreover they have similar accounting systems with a strong tradition of budgetary accounting. From a methodological point of view, a survey of Italian and Flemish local governments with populations above 30,000 has been conducted sending a questionnaire by e-mail to the Mayors and relevant council members (i.e. council members of culture) of 293 Italian and 308 Flemish Municipalities. Inspired by previous heritage assets researches and user needs researches, a set of information needs of the Mayor and councillors was developed. Results show that for Italian and Flemish politicians is important to find information about heritage assets in the governmental financial; moreover these users present similar results both in term of information requested both regarding the reasons why they ask this information. In fact both of them are mainly interested in the cost of the preservation of heritage assets, identification, allocation and use of the funding source for acquisitions; principally for financial accountability and public accountability reasons. Moreover, in both cases their information needs is not satisfied by the IPSAS 17; in fact empirical results evidence that IPSAS 17 responds to the user needs about heritage assets only for 42.9 % of Italian LGs and only for 29.4% of Flemish LGs.