Adopting Vietnamese Public Sector Accounting Standards: Readiness of Administrative and Public Service Units and the Issues Arising

Vietnam approved a scheme to publish a national suite of public sector accounting standards in 2019 and has since announced sixteen of them, while a new accounting regime for administrative and public service units took effect in the 2025 fiscal year. Whether those units are ready to apply the standards has been asserted repeatedly and assessed rarely, and the assessments that exist rest on perception surveys of small samples. This paper takes a different route. It builds a readiness assessment entirely from the public documentary record, coding seven dimensions against a published rubric that any reader can re-apply, and reports four findings that perception data would not have surfaced. Sixteen of a targeted twenty standards have been announced, the first two batches arriving an average of 7.1 months after their scheduled windows, and no further batch has appeared in the 27.1 months since June 2024. Four of the sixteen, a quarter of the suite, were drafted on international standards that the International Public Sector Accounting Standards Board superseded in May 2023, and the replacement for three of them took international effect on 1 January 2026, so Vietnam now holds revenue standards built on a withdrawn basis. The standards are announced rather than enacted, reaching preparers only through the accounting regime, which means a unit complies with a circular rather than with a standard. And the reorganisation that reduced provincial units from 63 to 34 and abolished the district tier took effect six months into the first year of the new regime, without any national standard on public sector combinations. The composite readiness index stands at 46.4 per cent of its maximum, with the weakest scores on currency of the adopted basis and stability of the accounting entity. Readiness, on this evidence, is constrained less by preparer capability than by the design of the reform itself.