The following short video of Sharon Edmundson, director of municipal finance programs with the North Carolina League of Municipalities, was one of seven we filmed at the Government Finance Officers Association’s annual conference in Orlando, Florida, between June 11 and June 13.

The previous videos, which were posted over the last couple of weeks, were with David Goldman, deputy city administrator for Oak Harbor, Washington, which can be seen here;  Zach Markovits vice president and local practice lead at Results for America, which you can view here; and GFOA Executive Director Chris Morrill, which is available here. 

We will continue sharing each of those short videos over the coming weeks. 

In this one, Edmundson, who is a member of the GFOA Rethinking Financial Reporting Task Force, focuses on the some of the findings of the task force, which was established to help deal with an overload of reporting requirements coupled with a shortage of competent staffers to put the reports together. We covered this topic thoroughly in a recent Route Fifty column “The Devil Is In The (Financial Reporting) Details”.

A few highlights from the video:

• “Quite honestly, most board members (and) elected leaders, really have two questions: They want to know how much money they can spend and whether or not the government stayed within its budget. And they’re having an increasing amount of difficulty finding that information in the financial report.”

• “I do think our mid and small size governments, in particular are struggling with financial reporting and having a product that is useful to everybody who needs to or wants to review the report.”

• “Governments need accountability to their taxpayers and their customers as well as to the folks that have lent them money and the folks that have given them grants, so it is really important that the financial (report) is usable by all these groups.”

  
  

(In 2023, we also produced a number of filmed interviews at GFOA’s annual conference in Portland, which we ran as one big feature under the headline “Voices from the GFOA.”)

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