It's Time for Timeliness.

• Author: Levine, Michele Mark
• Position: IN PRACTICE | ACCOUNTING - Requirement for the submission of annual comprehensive financial reports

The purpose of GFOA's Certificate of Achievement for Excellence in Financial Reporting Award Program (COA) is to encourage and assist state and local governments in going beyond the minimum requirements of generally accepted accounting principles to prepare annual comprehensive financial reports (ACFRs) that evidence the spirit of transparency and full disclosure, and then to recognize individual governments that succeed in achieving that goal.

For financial reporting to be effective, the information in the reports must be understandable, reliable, relevant, timely, consistent, and comparable. (1) The COA program requirements incorporate each of these characteristics. The characteristic of timeliness is incorporated by requiring submission of applications and annual comprehensive financial reports (ACFRs) within six months of the end of the fiscal year covered by the ACFR.

The COA's longstanding policy has been that governments could apply for an extension of one month when they experience extenuating circumstances, and this extension could be granted by GFOA staff. In certain cases, governments were permitted additional one-month extensions, up to a total of six extensions for a single year if circumstance warranted. With the extenuating circumstances caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, however, GFOA unofficially increased the maximum to 12 one-month extensions, meaning that with a COVID-19-related justification, a government could be eligible to win the award for an ACFR issued up to 18 months after the end of the subject fiscal year.

More than two and a half y ears after the start of the pandemic, however, GFOA needed to consider whether ACFRs that...