The Government’s “cloak and dagger” approach to the public finances has masked an “alarming” rise in debt obligations that puts future investment at risk, one of the country’s leading accountancy bodies will warn this week.

The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) will highlight that the current system, where the UK’s total liabilities are published more than a year after each fiscal year, “hinders transparency and reduces scrutiny”.

The ICAEW will use the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ Green Budget to call for an overhaul of the current publishing timetable to “understand the consequences of policy decisions”.

Published last May for the year ending March 2015, the latest whole of government accounts (WGA) revealed total UK liabilities of £3.6 trillion – equivalent to 191pc of UK gross domestic product (GDP).