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In the early 1990s, the consolidated financial statement approach applied by private companies was transposed to the French local public sector. The consensus around the need for the presentation of consolidated financial statements in the public sector as well as experiments conducted by local governments led to the belief that the generalization of this accounting device was just a matter of time. However, only a few local governments still applied it in the late 1990s. Using the model elaborated by Law and Callon (1992) for studying the trajectory of innovations, this paper revisits the dynamics of the consolidation of accounts in the French local public sector and clarifies the reasons for this innovation-s failure.