This study examines the current situation of responsibility accounting and proposed management solutions according to responsibility centers on public universities in Vietnam. The study applies quantitative research methods, and collected data through structured questionnaires to 138 public universities in Vietnam in 2019, receiving back 55 valid questionnaires. The data was cleaned and analyzed with SPSS software. The results show that most public universities in Vietnam assigned management responsibility to their departments, but responsibility accounting was not comprehensive since many universities are not financially autonomous. The Kruskal Wallis Test was conducted to compare the current situation of responsibility accounting among universities by the degree of autonomy and by geographic area. The research found out that totally autonomous universities assigned management responsibility to responsibility centers better than semiautonomous and non-autonomous universities did. Regarding the evaluation of management responsibility, universities in Central Vietnam rated specific quantitative criteria, residual income (RI) and returns on investment (ROI) higher than universities in the North and the South of Vietnam did. However, universities in the South of Vietnam rated the evaluation of profits by department higher than the rest. The study also suggests structure for establishing responsibility centers in accordance with public universities in Vietnam.

The study explores factors that affect the performance of responsibility accounting at public universities in Vietnam. The study conducted a survey of 130, out of 154 public universities in Vietnam and uses regression analysis methods. The results identify eight groups of factors affecting the performance of responsibility accounting at these establishments of higher education: Division of the organization into responsibility centers, Estimation and Reality, Cost and income allocation, University autonomy, Management decentralization, Estimation, Reward, and Report. Costs and income allocation for responsibility centers, university autonomy, and the division of universities into responsibility centers are shown to significantly affect the performance of public universities in Vietnam. The results show that the performance of responsibility accounting at public universities in Vietnam is influenced by decentralization of management, division of the organization into responsibility centers, reward, cost and income allocation, estimation, evaluation of the results achieved between the estimation compared with reality, release of reports and university autonomy. Among the factors, cost and income allocation, university autonomy, division of the organization into responsibility centers, reward and evaluation of results achieved between estimation and reality have strong impacts. The study findings also indicate that the school council does not affect responsibility accounting at these universities.