GASB Cleared to Proceed on Performance Measurement Despite strong protests from the GFOA and the major public interest groups representing state and local government, the Financial Accounting Foundation, which oversees the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB), has given the GASB the green light to add performance measurement (which it refers to as service efforts and accomplishments reporting -- SEA), to the board’s technical agenda. GFOA protested that the move amounted to a unilateral and unwarranted expansion of the GASB’s authority to set standards of accounting and financial reporting, and thus constituted a major violation of the 1984 agreement that established the GASB. Long experience in the public sector has repeatedly demonstrated that performance measurement can be truly effective only if it is fully integrated into a government’s budgetary process and reflects the government’s specific strategies, goals, and objectives as determined by elected officials. The GASB’s plans to incorporate performance measurement into “general purpose external financial reporting,” GFOA warned, will inevitably prove both counterproductive and a waste of scarce taxpayer resources.
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