The objective of this study was to investigate the process of change in the accounting systems from the perspective of the Critical Theory in a local public organization. The research process was conducted a case study in a municipal government in Brazil, which has undergone a process of change in their accounts over the last ten years. According to the information collected during the research process, depending on the source of information, the process of change in the accounts of the local government, which is the object of this study, originated from pressures that caused the change in the department called "internal audit" to "controllership", legal pressures being detected, of external, internal and political origin, for this change. As a limitation, the results were calculated in a local government inBraziland may not be applicable to other places. The city concerned has around 500,000 inhabitants and 9,000 civil servants, and the results may contribute to understand how to handle the change in structures involved with controllership. The focus of change was directed to the technical field, without a diagnosis of the analysis process of the possible social gains and even effectiveness that the change would bring, with managers responsible for the change having a restricted action by external pressures from the federal and state government. As the main contribution, the research presents an analysis of the change process in accounts in the public sector, using fundamentals of the Critical Theory as the basis of a case study, usually not applied to the accounting field
