Depreciação no serviço público: reconhecimento e evidenciação nas demonstrações contábeis dos estados e municípios brasileiros

Public institutions, as well as other entities, if use of various assets for development of its activities. These assets are tools that help with the generation of benefit present and future. For the assets that compound the Property, Plant and Equipament, this loss of generation of future benefits is called Depreciation and must be recognized as an expense in the period in which it occurs. This way, be considered as an expense, the depreciation has negative influence on the composition of the entity’s income, as this is the result of the confrontation between revenue and expenditure incurred in the same period. The Brazilian legislation regulates it is necessary to recognize and disclosure in the financial statements, all of the situations that interfere with the composition of economic and financial income of the public institution. The main objective of this work was to verify if the states and cities recognize and disclosure the depreciation on their Statements of Financial Position. The data were extracted from datas of the Brazilian public administration’s entities.. The sample analyzed is 100% of the States (including the Federal District) and 91% of the Brazilian cities. The research found the historical evolution of the expenditure with depreciation, evidenced in the balance sheets of the Brazilian cities, in the last 10 years, in the period 1999 to 2008. The results indicate that 10 Brazilian states (37 %) did not show the depreciation of fixed assets in the Statements of Financial Position of the year 2008. The situation is even more worrying in relation to cities, because 4,971 (98.4 %) of 5,050 municipalities not evidenced the depreciation. The evidence found in this study indicate that public entities do not recognize the expense with depreciation, which may indicate that the economic income and financial position presented in the financial statements of these public entities does not accurately reflect the actual situation of institutional performance.