Chair Joel Black says the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) is about to launch a 16-part video series designed to help elected officials make sense of the sprawling government financial reports they’re asked to vote on.
Speaking during a Financial Accounting Foundation Oversight Committee meeting on February 20, 2026, Black framed the project as part of GASB’s education mission—and as a response to a practical reality: many policymakers are not going to read lengthy guidance documents to decode lengthy annual reports.
At GASB, Black said, the board thinks about the main “users” of governmental financial reports in three broad categories: investors and other participants in the municipal bond market; citizens and taxpayers; and elected officials, such as state legislators, city council members and county commissioners. Those legislative officials, he said, often don’t have access to financial information in the same way the executive or administrative branch does.
For years, Black noted, GASB has published “user guides” tailored to those different audiences, and they remain available on the board’s website. But he characterized the elected-official guide—and a similar guide aimed at municipal bond analysts—as 200-page PDF documents. “In this day and age,” he said, “very few elected officials, if any, are probably going to read” a 200-page PDF to better understand the roughly 200-page annual report they receive.
The new video series is GASB’s attempt to modernize that education effort. Black said the package consists of 16 videos, each about 10 minutes long, intended to be accessible to viewers who are not deeply versed in governmental accounting and finance. While the primary audience is elected officials, he said citizens and taxpayers should also be able to follow along.
Rather than relying on a traditional “talking head” format, Black said the videos use a whiteboard-style approach. A GASB senior staff member will walk viewers through an example government financial report, drawing and highlighting elements as they are explained. The goal, Black said, is to cover “all parts” of a government financial report and describe—”in layman’s terms”—what each section is intended to do and how an elected official might use it.
The format is meant to work in two ways: officials can watch all 16 segments to get a full tour of a comprehensive annual financial report, Black said, or they can pick individual videos tied to the specific section they want to understand.
The series will be rolled out “in the next two weeks”. Several stakeholder organizations have agreed to help promote the series, said Black, including the National Association of Counties, the National League of Cities, the Government Finance Officers Association and the National Association of State Auditors, Comptrollers and Treasurers (NASACT), adding that partners were “really excited” about the effort and believe it will be helpful to their members.
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