In "The Documentary: The Corporation Nation" thread, Santa reminded me of a great CAFR thread that used to be stickied at GIM1.
What is a CAFR and are you surprised you've never heard about it? Don't be.
It's the best example of something politically explosive hidden in plain sight.
You can google and download any government entity's CAFR. Yet this accounting report is never mentioned in the MSM (or really anywhere else--kudos to activists like Walter Burien for bringing it to the public's attention).
Here's some info. about it from Wikipedia (I know, I know, it's not the best place to get the most or best information on things, but it's okay for a starting point):
A Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR)found its first roots with the establishment of the "National Committee on Municipal Accounting" (or NCMA, a private association) in 1934. In 1946 standards transitioned into another private association, based in Chicago, called the Government Financial Officers Association[2]. The GFOA promoted and applied nationally, to government, the CAFR accounting practice. By the 1970s, the CAFR became the nationwide paradigm for local government accounting. The various levels of government, federal, state, local and municipal each began producing a CAFR in 1946 to catalog an accurate picture of: institutional funds, enterprise or financial holdings, assets and total investment incomes, for those government and nongovernmental entities using the report. This measure is above and beyond the budget process and replaced what was regularly an "off-the-books" practice called the "general fixed-asset account group". General Purpose government "Budget" reports did not reflect accounting of this financial data and in effect with the co-operation or silence of any media reports, hid these assets and investments from the public by only reporting on the budget or "rainy day" funds or pension fund investments.
Differences between General Budgets and the CAFR
The primary difference between a budget and the CAFR is that the Budget is a plan for the next period (often year) primarily showing where tax income is applied and the CAFR contains the results of the period (year) with previous years accumulations. The CAFR contains a section that provides a comparison of period budget and actual. Additionally the CAFR gives a detailed showing of investment accounts by category reflecting balances derived over many years.
A Government budget document is a blueprint for a "specific grouping" of government agencies' spending over the course of an annual financial period. General Purpose Budgets contain both the spending categories of specified units of government, such as school districts, social services, transportation, police, fire, and park services; along with estimates of revenues expected to occur during the year, such as investment return; overrides of money from the previous year, and tax payments. They are usually more limited to the expected costs of running the aforementioned government operations through tax income as opposed to describing the status of any government fixed assets and investment wealth.
A CAFR [5] by contrast is meant to report the complete overall financial results of both those "specific groupings" of government agencies that appear in the current fiscal year General Purpose Budget and all other agencies and departments. These can be autonomous, enterprise (for example government or city owned golf courses), recycling, water, sewer, and financial management - often these agencies were created with the inception of that local, state or government. The CAFR provides information about all of these other government agencies that may have their own budgets and separate investment accounts but their financial holdings are not combined with the general purpose budget that the same government presents to the public. The CAFR, or as it is called in CANADA CanFR [6] can be used along with a budget document to compare the organizations total financial standing to the annual general purpose budget. The CAFR is the complete showing of the financial investment and income records from all sources, that reflects what has developed over decades whereas a budget report is an inferior document to the CAFR being that it is primarily focused on what revenue is expected to be brought in and spent for just the year.
In summation, the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report shows the total of all financial accounting that the basic general purpose budget reports do not. To find your local City; County; School District; or State government's CAFR do a Google Search. As an example for the city of Los Angeles, CA put in the search line using quotes: "The City of Los Angeles" "Comprehensive Annual Financial Report" and it will yield the link to download it: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=%22Th...0e7dd948e54cca
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Recent history
From at least 1998, a former Commodities Trading Advisor (CTA) of fourteen years Walter Bubien [7] AKA Burien - CAFR1 [8], and a federal auditor of thirty years Gerald Klatt who died on his birthday July 11th 2004 as noted in the SS death index who was from Tucson, AZ [9] have made specific and detailed claims upon showings seen and from referencing within the now 184,000 local government CAFRs, AFRs and other Federal audit reports such as; Audit of the IRS [10]; US Treasury Audit of Bank derivative holdings (tables 1, 2, 3 on pages 22, 23, 24 show that the top three banks were trading and holding over 150 trillion dollars worth of derivatives, apparently in primarily government accounts)[11]; US Treasury Audit of Bank Mortgage holdings [12]; Federal Consolidated Financial Statements [13]; CAFR for the Federal Reserve [14]; local Government's CAFR[15].
How many governments exist in the United States? The 1997 Census of Government says it best... "There were 87,504 governmental units in the United States as of June 1997. In addition to the Federal Government and the 50 state governments, there were 87,453 units of local government. Of these, 39,044 are general purpose local governments - 3,043 county governments and 36,001 sub-county general purpose governments, including 13,726 school district governments and 34,683 special district governments."
Some have called these the "2nd set of books", but as Mr. Burien says, the CAFR is "the book" with the budget being a section contained therein. Their assessments of government assets, holdings and investment supporting globalism, ownership by government investment "for profit" and government's international investments profits, significantly enhanced with the use of the now 600 trillion dollar international derivatives markets with government investments strategically placed for profit from free trade, war, commodity market, stock market, International investment movement and extreme price volatility is created by these massive moves by "institutional government funds" speculators scattered around the globe manipulating the market either deliberately or by volume.
Since 1998, with the CAFR being brought to the attention of the public by the efforts of Walter Burien and Gerald Klatt [16] the Government Accounting Standards Board, a private organization whose guidelines for CAFR accounting are followed by local governments,[17] starting with transmittal letter 31 in 1999 and now up to transmittal letter 46 as of 2007) made changes. This resulted in claims that such changes are calculated steps to hide from the general public's view, massive domestic and international wealth; investment assets and authority "enterprise funds" all of which could be seen more visibly outlined in the combined financial columns of 1999 and previous CAFRs which required a showing of gross totals. The modifications in effect transitioned the accounting from a showing of gross totals to a showing of "net" totals as now noted in the CAFRs. Anyone who operates a business knows there is a very big difference between final figures expressed as "gross" or "net" accounting. These changes are being done with virtual secrecy due to the money involved and because of virtually no media attention on these issues.
While a budget might indicate that a specific government or agency has financial trouble and debt, because of excess spending or mismanagement within the select grouping of "general fund" accounts presented, the CAFR may indicate, that overall, the same government entity, has many facets possessing large holdings and income considerably greater than what is shown in a budget report or the "general fund" alone. A few examples from recent history include, Jesse Ventura's returning 1.8 billion dollars (from the 8 billion targeted by him) of the government surpluses to voters as governor of Minnesota. Another example, in 1994, Orange County California government lost about $1.5 Billion on investments in the now massive derivative market and claimed they needed to declare bankruptcy per their general purpose budget even while holding several billion(about 11.3 billion) in profitable holdings in their investment portfolios as seen in the CAFR. The University of Kentucky's holdings of 85% of CHA Health [3] insurance stock was exposed in 2005 in the Lexington Herald Leader newspaper when CHA was sold to a rival firm [4] as part of the UK president's effort to raise a billion dollars to fund becoming a "top 20" research university an ongoing effort; to name a few examples.
A more recent example of CAFR mention is when a congressman from Oregon Rep. Bruce Hanna in 2010 during general session when the floor was discussing what to do about the state's 3.5 billion dollar budget shortfall (fire employees, cut back on services, close state parks), stood up with the cover page from the state of Oregon CAFR in his hand and pointed out that in less than a few minutes he found 3.5 billion dollars to satisfy the state shortfall and poof, no shortfall when the dots were connected between the state CAFR and the previous selective presentation of the State general purpose operating budget.. This video is State Rep. Bruce Hanna, openly exposing the Oregon State CAFR surplus to the Oregon Legislature. A must see! -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ8YhJyxPQo
and then a comment on the same from the Oregon Republican party site -
http://www.oregonrepublicanparty.org/node/291