The Governmental Accounting Standards Board is adding a major project on infrastructure asset accounting and financial reporting to its ongoing technical agenda.
The draft considers how infrastructure assets should be recognized and measured in the financial statements of state and local governments and whether the optional use of the modified approach should continue to allow reporting of infrastructure assets. It will also assess whether additional information related to the maintenance and upkeep of infrastructure assets should be presented in the financial statements and, if so, what information and where in the financial statements this information should be presented.
The project identifies options for setting standards to make relevant information about infrastructure assets more useful for decision-making and government accountability. Another goal is to make such information more comparable across governments and more consistent over time and more relevant to assessments of a government’s economic position. The GASB wants the information to better reflect the capacity of these assets to provide services and how that capacity may change over time.
Courtesy of GASB
Research conducted by the GASB over the past several years on financial reporting information for capital assets, including infrastructure assets, has extensively explored these areas. Many stakeholders shared their perspectives on the value of information about capital assets in financial statements, the difficulties in providing this information, and what other information is needed about capital assets.
The GASB decided to add a project focusing on infrastructure assets to its technical agenda after carefully evaluating the results of its staff survey this spring and taking into account input from its Governmental Accounting Standards Advisory Board, which ranked the project at the top of its annual project prioritization.
For more information on the agenda, visit https://gasb.org/techplan.
