7 New Global Governance Principles for Public Sector Accountants
This article will count 0.25 units (15 minutes) of unverifiable CPD. Remember to log these units under your membership profile.
The Auditor General South Africa flags the same problems year after year. Irregular expenditure. Weak internal controls. Leadership that can't account for where the money went. The question isn't whether we have a public sector governance problem, it's whether anyone is using the right tools to fix it.
On 30 March 2026, IFAC and CIPFA released the updated International Framework: Good Governance in the Public Sector — the first revision since 2014. It's a concise, principles-based diagnostic tool designed for anyone responsible for, or advising on, governance in the public sector: boards, councils, oversight committees, senior management, auditors, advisors, and regulators.
What's in the Framework?
The Framework is structured around seven interrelated principles, designed to work together rather than in isolation:
Principle A — Ethical values and the rule of law. Leadership must model integrity, embed codes of conduct, maintain whistleblowing protections, and take active steps to prevent corruption and conflicts of interest.
Principle B — Openness and stakeholder engagement. Entities should have formal openness policies, make decisions publicly accessible with clear rationale, and engage all relevant stakeholder groups — not just the loudest ones.
Principle C — Sustainable outcomes. Leadership must define outcomes in terms of economic, social, and environmental impact — short, medium, and long term — and ensure delivery capacity matches planned commitments.
Principle D — Optimising interventions. This covers how entities choose between delivery options, balance budgets against service priorities, and set KPIs to track whether programmes are actually working.
Principle E — Capacity and leadership. The right people, in the right roles, with the right skills. This includes separating governing body from management team responsibilities and ensuring neither dominates the other.
Principle F — Risk, performance, and internal controls. Entities must embed enterprise risk management (aligned to frameworks like COSO ERM or ISO 31000), safeguard resources against fraud and misuse, and maintain independent internal audit and audit committee functions.
Principle G — Transparency, reporting, and accountability. High-quality public reporting aligned to international standards — including the International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS) — and ensuring external audit findings are made public and acted on promptly.
Principles A and B are foundational as they underpin all the others. The Framework presents them not as a compliance checklist but as a diagnostic: each principle comes with a set of reflective questions designed to prompt honest conversation in leadership teams about where governance is genuinely working and where it isn't.
Why it matters for accountants in practice
If you work with municipalities, public benefit organisations, state-owned enterprises, or any entity that touches public resources, this Framework gives you globally recognised language to assess, challenge, and support better governance. It complements — rather than replaces — local governance codes, making it a useful reference when helping clients develop, update, or review their own governance frameworks.
The 2026 update also aligns the seven principles to the four thematic areas of the IFRS Foundation's ISSB sustainability standards, connecting governance directly to sustainability reporting obligations, a growing area of client exposure.
