GASB Pilots New Outreach Approaches

July 26, 2021

By Joel Black, Chair, Governmental Accounting Standards Board, and external advisory panel member, Government Finance Research Center

With my first year as Chair now behind me, I’m excited to tell readers of the Government Finance Research Center blog about new outreach methods the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) is piloting to broaden participation in our process and make it easier for stakeholders to engage with us.

Before I started with the GASB, I served on its primary advisory body, the Governmental Accounting Standards Advisory Council (GASAC). At the time, I often wondered about what the GASB Board could do to make it easier for stakeholders to participate in the process used to create standards.

I wondered, too, what the Board could do to get more feedback from users of governmental financial statements, including legislators, investors in government bonds, financial analysts, and citizen advocacy organizations.

Ultimately, the work done at the GASB is aimed at providing users the information they need to be able to make decisions and assessments using the information presented in governmental financial reports. But without a high-level of engagement from them, the Board can find itself missing a critical element.

What could the GASB Board could do to make it easier for users of financial statements to participate? Were there ways it could use technology to facilitate this input?

A few challenges

During my first year as chair, we worked through our share of obstacles to accomplishing things that needed to be done quickly and easily—including working in a fully remote environment and providing stakeholders the resources they needed to deal with the pandemic from an accounting perspective.

We also needed to find the best successor for Dave Bean, who had served as GASB’s Director of Research and Technical Activities for more than thirty years. We were successful on that front, when Alan Skelton, who served on the GASAC and is Georgia’s former State Accounting Officer, was selected as the GASB’s new director earlier this year.

Over the past months, the GASB staff, Alan, and I have worked together to develop the new outreach methods that we are now beginning to pilot that will help us begin to realize the goals I’ve mentioned.

The Time Is Right for New Approaches

The process stakeholders have gone through for many years to share input with the GASB—writing a formal comment letter or participating in a public hearing or user forum—hasn’t changed much since we started in 1984.

The traditional methods are still in place and we encourage stakeholders to continue to share their views in those ways. I am hopeful the new approaches we’ve developed will help us capture a greater number of perspectives and ideas and will further improve the quality of the resulting standards going forward.

To begin with, we are offering an electronic input form that will make it easier for people to share the feedback. This is beginning with one that can be used for the GASB’s recent proposal on Accounting Changes and Error Corrections. It will be going live sometime this week, at which point you’ll be able to access it by clicking here. If that link isn’t operative when you read this, come back again in a day or so. This electronic form allows stakeholders to share their thinking with us on many aspects of the proposal without having to go through the formal comment letter process, which can be time consuming and maybe even a little daunting.

Also, we’re offering a series of short videos that look at key areas of the Accounting Changes proposal. After each one, we’ll share links to other videos in the series, the Exposure Draft, the electronic input form, and offer an opportunity to provide feedback on what you watched.

While the videos are targeted at financial statement users, all of our stakeholders may find them helpful and the new feedback mechanism an easier way to provide input.

We’ll be sharing the items I’ve mentioned in a number of ways, including by email and social media—so, be on the lookout and let us know what you think. We’d love to hear from you.

Final Thoughts

Beyond these initial approaches we’re piloting, we’ll be looking at how we do things across other GASB activities to see what we can do to make them more inclusive, easier, and timelier. Leveraging technology will play an important role—so stay tuned for more on this coming soon.

I appreciate the opportunity to share some of the things the GASB is working on with those of you who are reading this blog post.  If you’d like to discuss anything I’ve mentioned here in more detail—or have other GASB-related issues you’d like to talk over—please let me know. I look forward to hearing from you.