The sustainability of the existing cost management system with an emphasis on the public sector

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to compare the cost management approaches in the public and private sectors, with an emphasis on the public sector. The data was collected in 2017 and 2018 in the Czech Republic. The main results showed that most respondents do not use Activity Based Costing and that there are no statistically significant differences between the public and private sector. Both public and private sectors, if keeping records of management accounting, charge costs in such a way so as to be able to determine the total costs of their activities at any time. Not even the fact that an organization uses public funds increases the chance of the given organization to look for the information about its full costs. Most of the respondents in both groups make important financial decisions based on knowledge of full costs of their activities. The research thus has not proved that the public sector subjects would have a different approach to finding out about full costs than the private sector units.