Modern approaches to asset disclosure have much in common across all sectors of the economy. The criteria for the recognition of assets, signs of their classification and methods of assessment have been unified. Meanwhile, the policy of recent decades to unify the reporting of assets of private and public sector has caused and continues to cause discussion. The information content and, consequently, the usefulness and relevance of reporting on public sector assets, formed within the framework of the policy of unification of reporting data, is disputed. The purpose of the study is to establish the correspondence of the modern model of public sector accounting of assets to the information requests of users of public sector reporting and to formulate the directions for its improvement. The study provides a comparative and retrospective analysis of approaches to the recognition, classification and valuation of assets in the private and public sectors of the economy. Economic theory is considered as a connecting factor in the study of two accounting systems in search of a basis for their harmonization. The research was motivated by the changes in Russian public sector accounting in recent years.