Making Government Annual Comprehensive Reports Easier to Search

We at Truth in Accounting (TIA) strive to bring you the most current and accurate data from financial reports that we can. We distribute that information through our State of the States and State of the Cities reports and our Data Z website. What you don’t see from Truth in Accounting is the behind-the-scenes team of people pulling this data from the government financial statements.

So, the point is, if the experts at Truth in Accounting have difficulty searching data in government reports and struggle meticulously to ferret out the reported information, how do citizens search this data? Don’t citizens have a right to access easily searchable information about how their government is using their hard-earned tax dollars?

Thus, TIA’s stance is that government reports should be as easy to search as those of a publicly traded company. After all, we, as taxpayers, are as much of an investor in our governments as a private investor is in a publicly traded company.

Our next two blog posts will explain the SEC's requirements for publicly traded companies. What are their reporting mechanisms? Then, we will look at how these requirements would assist taxpayers in looking at data on how their governments use tax dollars.

Christine Kuglin, JD, LLM, CPA, is the Executive Director for the Truth in Accounting Project at the University of Denver Daniels College of Business.