XBRL US member Marc Joffe, chair of the Standard Government Reporting Working Group, and Senior Policy Analyst at the Reason Foundation, weighed in on the need for better revenue and expenditure data from state and local government to appropriately allocate COVID-19 aid funds in his March 16 article published at Federalism.US. Joffe notes:
"During the coronavirus pandemic, the lack of timely and standardized state and local disclosure prevented policymakers from quickly determining with any degree of accuracy how much revenue was lost as the pandemic unfolded.
If every state, major city, and county produced monthly cash reports in a standardized, machine readable format within two weeks of month-end, federal policy makers would have had a much better picture of how revenues and expenditures are evolving....
Ideally, of course, all state and local governments would adopt a single reporting taxonomy (i.e., data dictionary) that could be readily consolidated. Our Standard Government Reporting working group at XBRL US has produced a draft taxonomy for annual financial reporting. A small subset of items from this taxonomy could be applied to monthly reporting. Our taxonomies can be used with CSV, JSON and human-readable HTML reports."
Read the article.
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