Due to concerns about the government's debt, the European Commission issued the Late Payments Directive (LPD) to discourage the culture of late payments that threatens their financial sustainability. Despite the intention to hold member states accountable for public entities' payment behaviour, the LPD did not specify the methodology for performance feedback. To better understand the Portuguese performance regarding the payment period (PP), this exploratory study investigates whether local governments may have used different categories of liabilities as part of a gaming strategy. Data were collected from 308 Portuguese local governments between 2014 and 2019 (the last available year). The findings of the descriptive and Pearson correlation analyses suggest that local governments with lower and higher PPs have different patterns of indebtedness over time. By providing insights into the Portuguese local governments' performance feedback on the LPD, this paper contributes to the literature on gaming behaviours in public organizations.
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