Act no. 6 of 2014 spells out the existence of central government financial aid to villages or known as village funds. Consequently, there is an allocation of funds sourced from the State Budget (APBN) directly managed by the village. As a result, the village apparatus must implement a fund management system in accordance with the technical regulations of the Ministry of Home Affairs no. 113 of 2014 on Village Financial Management. The technical rules are intended to be transparent, accountable, and participative in an orderly and budget-disciplined manner. The people on the island of Timor, specifically the Dawan Tribe, are still living in the traditional way and firmly upholding their culture. This will be a challenge for the government in implementing policies related to the financial management of village funds. A system functions within an organization, so it must be designed to reflect the values of the organizational culture. However, it is also important that a system should influence the organizational culture in controlling the flow of information within the organization. The success of the system depends on human behavior.

The fact is an accounting system is unlikely to be applied to a culture different from that developed by the culture of the system. Accounting systems used in developing countries may be irrelevant to their needs as they come from western countries with different cultural values (Perera, 1989; Baydoun and It, 1995; Askary, 2006; Kwok and Tadesse, 2006; Hauriasi and Davey, 2009). The application of IFRS is also a topic in various studies in terms of its application. In existing studies, it was found that the application of IFRS was confronted with the local culture of the country (Chand et al., 2012; Xu, 2013; Braun and Rodriguez, 2014). Gray (1988) proposes a link between Geert Hofstede’s (Hofstede, 1980) popular cultural dimension used in comparative management analysis and its own comparative concept for accounting. Hofstede’s original four-dimensional power distance, individualism, masculinity, and avoidance of uncertainty and Gray’s accounting value of Professionalism versus law control, uniformity versus flexibility, conservatism versus optimism, and confidentiality versus transparency. Gray’s accounting dimensions are intended to capture the fundamental cultural values that would be likely to affect the accounting system.

This study presents the role of local culture and community characteristics in applying the system of village fund management to promote accountability, transparency, and participation. The purpose of this study is to uncover how traditional cultures and their characteristics influence the implementation of the system of village fund management. By applying an ethnographic approach, this study highlights cultural diversity that affects human life. Observation and documentary searches were conducted to obtain the data for this study. The observation used was a non-participatory observation method. This observation was aimed to observe the behavior of this tribe. The documentary search was done to find out the history of the Dawan tribe and its development through previous studies concerning the Dawan tribe.

This study found that there is a link between the cultures of the Dawan people in the Timorese community with the implementation of village fund management for the creation of good village governance. Dawan culture has a large power distance, weak uncertainty avoidance, collectivism, and low masculine (femininity) which will lead to failure in the management of village funds. This failure may be caused because the system implemented contains western cultural values that conflict with the local cultural values of the community itself. This has come to the attention of previous studies which found that accounting systems used in developing countries may not be relevant to their needs because they come from western countries with different cultural values The study bridges the debates about Hofstede’s dimensions used in accounting research. The debates have appeared for decades but no one can beat Hofstede’s appeal. However, the coverage of this study is limited only to Dawan culture. It may be the case that the phenomenon in found Dawan culture is also found in other Indonesian cultures under a different name. A nation-level coverage study should be done, in order to establish a new dimension instead of depending on Hofstede’s dimensions.

Author: Prof. Dr. Bambang Tjahjadi, S.E., M.BA, Ak.

Journal link:

https://www.inderscienceonline.com/doi/abs/10.1504/IJPSPM.2022.124118