Despite its importance for economic policy and capital markets, sovereign general government debt is not measured under harmonized or enforceable global accounting standards. As a result, credit rating agencies (CRAs) apply ad-hoc adjustments to transform heterogeneous fiscal data into comparable figures for rating purposes, giving rise to disagreement even over historical debt levels. Using historical debt-to-GDP figures reported by S&P, Moody’s, and Fitch for 88 countries from 2006 to 2018, we find that dispersion in CRA sovereign debt assessments is economically meaningful, averaging just over 3% of GDP. We show that this dispersion is related to features of the sovereign fiscal reporting environment. Disagreement is higher in countries with greater exposure to contingent liabilities and weaker fiscal transparency and is lower in countries subject to supranational debt rules, such as those in the European Union. Standard macroeconomic fundamentals explain relatively little of the variation in dispersion once accounting and institutional factors are considered […]