Abstract: As one of the important forms of opportunism in budgeting, budgetary shirking is essentially the behavior of only spending low efforts through hiding action in performing the budget contract. We should not only define this construct in theoretical category in order to differentiate it at the qualitative regularity from the budgetary slack at the link of budget signing, but also provide a measuring tool for further quantitative study. After reviewing literatures and analyzing theories, this paper prepares 9 testing items about budgetary shirking by means of in-depth interviews and focus discussions; then taking 449 questionnaires as the measuring tool, it makes an analysis with EFA and CFA to obtain the two dimensions of discretionary shirking and constraint shirking as well as the corresponding 6 formal topics. At last it constructs a scale of budgetary based on the local situations and expounds its application values.

Key words: budgeting; shirking; construct defining; scale testing