2022 Annual Conference: Accounting and Financial Reporting
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Sessions for Sunday, June 5
The Price is Right: Setting User Charges and Fees for Government Services
State and local governments, utilities, and stand-alone business-type organizations use charges and fees to help fund services (both external and internal), and well-designed charges and fees can reduce the need for additional revenue sources and promote service efficiency. However, for many organizations, setting user fees and charges can be difficult. This session will explore the important elements to consider during the charge and fee setting process for all organizations including organizational politics, community preferences, cost recovery, and fairness. The session will also highlight from GFOA's rethinking revenue research on segmented pricing and use of imposed fees.
Sessions for Monday, June 6
Identifying, Classifying, and Disclosing Component Units
It is often difficult to determine whether a legally separate entity should be reported as a component unit (CU) of another government and, if so, whether it is properly included as a fiduciary, blended or discretely presented CU. Topics include the criteria for identifying and classifying CUs and the disclosures required to explain how and why each has been incorporated.
Paying Not to Perform: Compensated Absence Accounting Under GASB’s New Guidance
GASB's statement on Compensated Absences reexamines and updates the accounting and financial reporting for compensated absences. This session will delve into the use of paid time off (PTO) by some governments rather than the more traditional approach of separate sick and vacation leave, and explain how PTO and other forms of compensated absences will be accounted for and reported based on the new standard.
Preparing an ACFR Statistical Section
Generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) require governments that produce an annual comprehensive financial report to include a statistical section. This session will focus on how to create the required schedules for each of the five categories of a statistical section, and where to obtain the relevant trend data using some practical examples from a variety of governmental entities.
Sessions for Tuesday, June 7
Coming Up Next: Implementing GASB 94 (P3) and 96 (SBITA)
Coming on the heels of implementing new guidance on leases, governments must now implement GASB statements on accounting and reporting for subscription-based information technology arrangements (SBITAs) and public-private and public-public partnerships (PPPs). This session will review the new statements and share lessons learned from governments that have implemented these standards, as well as those that can be extrapolated to these arrangements from implementations of the lease standard.
Not Again! Avoiding Common Financial Reporting Errors
Each year, GFOA staff and volunteer reviewers for GFOA's Certificate of Achievement for Excellence in Financial Reporting program perform reviews on over 4,300 annual comprehensive financial reports (ACFRs). This session will examine a number of the more common deficiencies identified during these reviews, with a special emphasis on the calculation of net investment in capital assets.
Sessions for Wednesday, June 8
Making Peace with Leases
Many governments have or will soon be finalizing their first financial statements prepared using GASB’s new lease guidance now in effect. For some, this will be a post-mortem, a chance to compare notes on how the transition went, and get suggestions on ways to make future accounting and financial reporting for leases easier. For others, this will be an opportunity to fine-tune initial implementation before "pulling the trigger" on lease accounting. Speakers, including practitioners who have already implemented the new guidance and auditors, will address some of the more common issues seen with implementation thus far.
