Federal Involvement in State and Local Government Financial Disclosure is an Unnecessary Mandate In response to suggestions made by a member of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission(SEC) that Congress should require state and local governments to follow corporate style financial reporting and disclosure, GFOA Executive Director/CEO, Jeffrey L. Esser issued a statement indicating that GFOA will strongly oppose such a federal mandate.
He went on to suggest that federal officials who think that state and local government financial information is unavailable are apparently unfamiliar with the public availability of financial information in government, open meeting and sunshine laws and the wealth of information which can be found on government web sites and the Internet. Esser said, those who suggest that corporate financial information disclosure is a better route seem to ignore the entire government budgeting process, the constant dissemination of financial information to state and local government legislative bodies as well as the wealth of trend information which can be found in the so-called statistical section of a government’s comprehensive annual financial report. He suggested that federal officials who can only recognize financial information in the context of an audited annual report need to become familiar with all forms of state and local government financial disclosure in order to understand that everything governments do is fully transparent. |
