Swedish municipalities are obliged to continually and annually account and disclose information in certain accounting reports. The accounting obligation for municipalities is set forth in the Swedish Local Government Act. Since the year 1998 there is also a Local Government Accounting Act (LGAA) in place. In accordance with LGAA a requirement on all accounting is that it needs to be established in line with Swedish General Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP).

At the same time as LGAA came into effect, the state and the municipal federations established a new standard-setting body. It had, and still has, the task to publish recommendations with the body’s view on how municipalities should account in accordance with Swedish GAAP. The body received the name The Council for Municipal Accounting, CMA. In this study the complex of norms that is of certain importance for Swedish municipalities when they account are analysed. Questions that are analysed are e.g. what position and function the standard-setting body CMA and the body’s recommendations have in a legal context. Another question that is analysed is how the regulation for municipalities should be understood in relation to the regulation for private sector.

Some of the conclusions in the study are that there is a possibility to identify a Swedish GAAP for Municipalities which has its own systematic. The legal control of whether municipalities account in accordance to Swedish GAAP is weak though. When evaluating what should be seen as Swedish GAAP for municipalities, there is a presumption that the recommendations from CMA are the correct interpretations, even though the recommendations in line with the constitution can not be seen as any form of binding law. In light of this, the strength of the presumption is somewhat unclear, but should not be seen as strong as the equivalent presumption that recommendations from standard-setting bodies in private sector are the correct interpretation of Swedish GAAP.

Sveriges kommuner och landsting har sedan länge varit skyldiga att redovisa utfallet av sin verksamhet. Det kommunala redovisningsområdet har gått från att vara i stort sett oreglerat, till en reglering som under de senaste två decennierna utvecklats i väsentlig grad. Dagens reglering är emellertid inte okomplicerad utan ger upphov till ett flertal intressanta rättsliga frågeställningar, bland annat frågan om vilken rättslig ställning som kan tillskrivas olika typer av normer inom området.

I denna rättsvetenskapliga studie analyseras, systematiseras och utvärderas regleringen som berör den kommunala redovisningsskyldigheten, särskilt i ljuset av att redovisningen ska upprättas i enlighet med den rättsliga standarden god redovisningssed. Undersökningen omfattar flera rättsområden där konstitutionella, kommunal- och redovisningsrättsliga frågor behandlas parallellt. Inom ramen för undersökningen utvärderas bland annat förhållandet mellan lagstiftningen och den s.k. kompletterande normgivningen, både ur ett principiellt perspektiv och genom en särskild undersökning av fyra utvalda redovisningsfrågor. De fyra redovisningsfrågor som behandlas är redovisningen av materiella anläggningstillgångar, bidrag till infrastruktur, pensionsåtagandet samt den sammanställda redovisningen.