Accounting and Internal Control in Professional Education Institutions as an Instrument of Education Quality

Professional education institutions in Uzbekistan have become the principal channel through which the economy is supplied with mid-level occupational skills, yet their accounting and internal control arrangements are still designed to demonstrate compliance with estimate and staff discipline rather than to manage the quality of education. This study asks whether, and through which channels, accounting and internal control operate as instruments of education quality in publicly financed professional education institutions. An explanatory sequential mixed-method design was applied: content analysis of thirty-one national regulatory acts governing the financing, accounting and control of budget organisations; descriptive analysis of official statistics on the network of 712 technikums operating in 2025/2026; and an expert diagnostic survey measuring internal control maturity against the five components of the COSO framework. The results show that the accounting subsystem generates almost no programme-level cost information, that control effort remains concentrated in ex-post inspection, and that risk assessment and monitoring are the least developed components. The paper therefore proposes an integrated Accounting-Control-Quality architecture combining programme-level cost accounting, a standing risk register and eight quality-linked financial indicators, offering a transferable model for the governance of vocational education in transition economies.