Illinois taxpayers still don’t have audited financials from fiscal year 2023, but the state’s comptroller says they’re working to speed annual reports up.

Truth In Accounting founder Sheila Weinberg said Illinois continues to be among the states with tardy financial reporting.

Truth-in-Accounting, a Chicago-based fiscal watchdog, has issued another in its series of reports on transparency in the states’ financial reporting.

Illinois, unfortunately, finished 50th in the ranking of all 50 states.

Meanwhile, a big-picture view of local finances, via the watchdogs at Truth in Accounting, suggests that the city council is as complicit as the mayor in not reining in big spending at the expense of the future. 

Earlier this year, the group reported a per capita debt of nearly $10,000 for every person in the city, which puts Jacksonville 60th out of 75 cities ranked. 

California’s inability to provide timely financial data is legendary. As TIA’s earlier report noted, as of August 31, 2024, California had not released its fiscal year 2023 annual financial report, making it the fifth year in a row California has been late submitting critical information. 

Suburban life promises predictability: safe streets, good schools and reliable trash pickup. For many, especially in Kansas City’s orbit, it’s a preferred alternative to the aging infrastructure and financial shortfalls common in urban cores. But as these suburbs grow, they inherit similar challenges — just on a delay. Their balance sheets today play a large part in their potential and possibilities tomorrow.

Recently Elon Musk has had more drama with his former friend President Donald Trump, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has some pretty decent advice for Musk. I have serious issues with all three of these jokers. In late December, Musk led the way in defending the corrupt H-1B visa system that deliberately suppresses the wages of American tech workers. It does this via replacing them with mostly Indians who are treated like indentured servants by large firms. Regarding DeSantis, in 2023 he traveled to a foreign country (Israel) to sign a law that unconstitutionally protects certain groups from speech they find offensive.

A new Truth in Accounting report pegs Illinois as being dead last among all 50 states when it comes to financial transparency.

The five U.S. territories are just one piece of the gigantic debt burden across America. The 50 states were collectively $811 billion in debt at the end of 2023, and the 75 largest cities were $300.7 billion in debt, according to estimates from the think tank Truth in Accounting. The federal debt is over $36.2 trillion.

When the U.S. lost its last AAA credit rating earlier this month, a nonprofit group that tracks government spending wasn't surprised. Truth in Accounting, which pushes for financial transparency across all levels of government, had already given the federal government its own grade: F.

For city leaders, the internal report one year ago was startling: Pittsburgh’s finances, despite the glowing claims of some elected officials, were on the brink of disaster.

Although the state of Connecticut is sitting on a massive accumulative state pension debt of some $35 billion, most of the chatter in our media concerns the state’s biennial “surplus.”

Fleischer addressed a statement from the public finance watchdog group Truth in Accounting, which cited the Montclair schools’ audit report advising of a $23.9 million “unrestricted” deficit for the year ending June 30, 2024 as a concern.

“They have pushed these costs into the future,” Sheila Weinberg, founder and CEO of the national public finance watchdog group, told Montclair Local. “You can think of it as your credit. This is how much they put on the taxpayers’ credit card that they’ll have to pay off in the future.”

While the federal government reports a national debt nearing $37 trillion, one budget watchdog says the figure is actually much higher: $158.6 trillion, amounting to $974,000 for each federal taxpayer.

Truth in Accounting, a nonprofit budget accountability group that emphasizes a different approach to government accounting, released those figures, arguing that they more accurately represent the fiscal situation of the federal government.