Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Question re GASB and component units and display in financial statements

Yesterday there was a chat/email reference questions from a student looking how to display component units in financial statements under the Government Accounting Standards Board.

The GASB standards are available on RIA Checkpoint, and the AICPA publications also available there offer guidance. They can be searched for component units. I glanced through the AAG State and Local Government Guide published by the AICPA. (Another term for component units is affiliated organizations, I learned through a search on ABI Inform Global of GASB and component units.

As with FASB, there are secondary guides available on Lexis-Nexis for Government Accounting. The easiest way to find them is to click Sources, and do a word search in the search box for GAAP. This brings up all the online GAAP guides, including the Government Accounting GAAP Guide.

If you search component units and GASB on Google, the firt article with the link from the nysscpa.org was from 1990. I would hope retrieving such an old article might raise some immediate concerns. Government accounting has had some major changes in recent years so this article was probably way too old.

I went to ABI Inform Global and did a keyword search GASB and component units. Some articles were retrieved that explained the recent changes and gave some examples. From reading the AICPA guide, and the others sources, I realized New York's many public authorities might be considered component units. So I found an examples by googling component unit new york state, and then looked on the Comptroller's web site for the annual state reports.

NY City Transit Authority--component of the state

New York State Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports

I would caution any student that this was done by a librarian who has not studied government accounting.

Rita

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