-Effects of SNC-AP on Real Estate Transfer Disclosure Among Public Entities: Comparative Analysis with POCP/POCAL

SNC-AP (“Sistema de Normalização Contabilística para as Administrações Públicas”) was implemented in Portugal in the first January of 2018 and came to replace POCP (“Plano Oficial de Contabilidade do Setor Público”) and all the different subsystems related to the public sector, POCAL (“Plano Oficial de Contabilidade das Autarquias Locais”), POCMS (“Plano Oficial de Contabilidade do Ministério da Saúde”), POCSSSS (“Plano Oficial de Contabilidade da Instituições do Sistema de Solidariedade e da Segurança Social”). POCAL aimed the local municipalities by taking into consideration their necessities and specific functions while SNC-AP is applied to all public entities that belong to the direct administration of the state. It tends to be more comprehensive by considering the diversity of entities in the public sector. The transition process to this new accounting system for Public Administration aimed to harmonize accounting practices, promote transparency, improve the quality of accounting information presented on financial statements by following internationally recognized principles and standards such as IPSAS (International Public Sector Accounting Sector), and came to standardize all the accounting system in the public sector by just having one system for all the different subsectors. SNC-AP plays a crucial role in terms of organization, standardization, and control over the accounting practices in Portugal by meeting the needs of central and local authorities and municipalities. The proposed case study on this work aims to analyze the development of Portuguese accounting practices and underscore the pivotal role of IPSAS in shaping a modernized Portuguese accounting system. Namely, it pretends to highlight the differences between POCAL and SNC-AP in theoretical and practical terms. It is important to know what changed between these two systems and how that affected the accounting information in practical terms. Understand if the journal entries changed, depreciation rate, useful life of the assets, and if the system or registration of those assets also changed when SNC-AP started to produce effects on the first January of 2018 and on the first January of 2020 for municipalities.