Identifying and Ranking Cultural Components Affecting Internal Controls in Nonprofit Public Sector Organizations of Iran

Regarding the importance of the concept of internal control in preventing wastage of public resources of the country and achieving the expected goals of the public sector, the overall objective of the present study was to identify the various cultural components affecting internal control in public sector organizations meanwhile evaluating their importance in impacting on internal control process in public sector nonprofit organizations. In this regard, it was attempted to rank the cultural factors in terms of their importance in influencing the implementation of the concept of internal control in the organizations under study by obtaining the views of statistical samples in the form of interviews and questionnaires and by using confirmatory factor analysis and TOPSIS techniques. The results of the first phase of the research showed that the concept of culture can affect the quality of internal control in public sector organizations in three ways: managers’ culture, staff’s culture and corporate macro culture. In addition, the results of the second phase of the study on The evaluation of the degree of importance of the cultural components indicated that three cultural components, including managementchr('39')s view of internal controls in non-profit organizations, employees’ behavioral characteristics, and employeeschr('39') view of internal controls are three important cultural priority factors affecting the quality of controls. Based on findings it could be noted that it is necessary to pay special attention to these components in non-profit organizations in order to improve the quality of internal controls.