GASB Guy

Year 1 on the GASAC

Last week, I attended the third and final meeting for 2025 of the Governmental Accounting Standards Advisory Council (GASAC), the primary advisory group to the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB). My first year as a member of the GASAC, having been nominated by the National Federation of Municipal Analysts (NFMA), was a mind-bending experience, mostly because it felt so odd to be sitting on the other side of the table, so to speak (actually, the table is a rectangle, with GASAC and GASB members interspersed, so it doesn’t literally matter what side of the table you’re on). Throughout my 24 years on the GASB staff, I served as Coordinator for the GASAC, supporting the GASAC chair and functioning as the main liaison between the GASAC and the GASB staff and members. Being a member of the GASAC was bound to be at least a little strange.

About the GASAC

The GASAC has existed as long as the GASB itself, being modeled after the Financial Accounting Standards Advisory Council (FASAC), just as the GASB was modeled after the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). The GASAC started with 20 members, including the organizations that signed the memorandum of understanding with the Financial Accounting Foundation (FAF) to create the GASB (such as the Government Finance Officers Association [GFOA]; National Association of State Auditors, Comptrollers, and Treasurers [NASACT]; and American Institute of Certified Public Accountants [AICPA]) and rounded out with other organizations to represent the GASB’s stakeholders as broadly and completely as possible (e.g., the bond rating agencies, American Accounting Association [AAA], Association of School Business Officials International [ASBOI], and Healthcare Financial Management Association [HFMA]).

The GASAC has since grown to 33 members as the FAF has sought to bring to the table important stakeholder viewpoints not represented by other nominating organizations. Initially, the members included a trustee from the FAF’s board and a representative of the U.S. Governmental Accountability Office (GAO), but both eventually withdrew to observer-only status to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. New voices added to the GASAC over the past 41 years included:

Most recently, the FAF added three new nominating organizations in 2025: Airports Council International – North America (ACI-NA), National Association of Black Accountants (NABA), and National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA).

Between 1994 and 2013, the GASAC also included a member-at-large, identified by the GASB and appointed by the FAF, for the purpose of bringing new perspectives to the conversation that weren’t fully represented by existing members or associations. The experience with the first three – a citizen group staff member, an academic researcher, and a staff member from the Census Bureau – contributed to the FAF’s decision to permanently add nominating organizations representing those constituencies to the GASAC. (The first at-large member was Cindy Green, who was subsequently appointed by the FAF to be the first full-fledged financial statement user on the Board.)

The GASAC meets in person with the GASB three times a year, generally timed to precede the Board’s thrice-yearly consideration of the GASB technical plan. The meetings generally run about a day-and-a-half, featuring a mix of reports to the members (from the FAF executive director, GASB chair, and GASB director of research and technical activities) and GASAC member discussion of projects and other activities of the GASB. The latter typically involves the GASB staff preparing a paper on key topics in GASB standards setting projects, pre-agenda research, or other activities and the GASAC members replying to questions posed in the papers. GASAC members also are given the opportunity at every meeting to bring to the GASB’s attention emerging issues in practice that they believe the GASB should look into and possibly provide guidance on. The feature of the first GASAC meeting of the year is each member of the GASAC identifying the potential standards-setting topics in the GASB’s technical plan that they believe are the highest priorities for the GASB to work on. The Board considers that input seriously when it decides what projects to add to its technical agenda; numerous GASB pronouncements address issues that originally were identified by GASAC members or designated as high priorities for the GASB’s attention.

GASAC Members

You might be surprised to learn that although some GASAC members are accountants, most are not. That’s because most GASB stakeholders are not accountants; for instance, they are other government officials, such as budget directors, city managers, and state treasurers, or financial statement users of various kinds (citizen groups, analysts from different parts of the municipal bond industry, state legislators, professors of accounting or public administration, bond attorneys). What they all have in common is that they are well versed in the viewpoints of the members of the organizations that nominated them and are capable of bringing that perspective to the meetings with the Board.

GASAC members may not all be able to discuss highly technical accounting topics, but they all can speak knowledgably about why a particular topic is important to their members or other stakeholders like them. They are capable of explaining to the Board members how the potential solutions being considered during standards setting would affect the work performed and decisions made by the stakeholders they represent.

Something else that may surprise observers is that although all but three of the GASAC members are nominated by professional associations, it is the individuals who are the members of the GASAC, not their nominating organizations. That distinction is important because it means that GASAC members not only can share the perspectives of the members of their associations but also their own opinions in instances in which their points of view or experiences are different.

By my rough count, 301 different people have served on the GASAC. At present, members can serve up to three two-year terms (originally, it was up to four one-year terms, but that proved administratively cumbersome and resulted in too much turnover). However, they can subsequently be nominated by other organizations or even by the same organization later on. Several people have served twice, among them Bob Scott, who served as the GFOA nominee 2001-2004 and currently since 2022. Only one person has served three separate times: Anne Ross, who was the NFMA member 2004-2009 and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) in 1999-2002 and 2011-2014. The greatest number of years served by a member other than the chair, however, was by Bob Reardon from State Farm, who was the insurance investor member 1997-2006 and again 2013-2018. Harvey Eckert served as the National Governors’ Association (NGA) member 1987-1990, and again from 1992 to June 2005, having been appointed chair of the GASAC by the FAF starting in 1996 – that’s 16-and-a-half years. Until relatively recently, there were no limits on how long someone could serve as chair; now, it is limited to three two-year terms as chair.

The GASAC membership has included some of the giants of governmental accounting over the years. Frank Greathouse, Paul Pacter, Jack Miller, and Bill Snodgrass are among the foundational greats that I “grew up” with in governmental accounting. At least a dozen GASAC members have been authors or co-authors of governmental accounting textbooks, including all that are currently on the market. That list includes Leon Hay, Earl Wilson, and Bob Freeman.

And the GASAC has been a great launching pad for future GASB members. Board members who previously served on the GASAC include Joel Black (the current GASB chair), Bill Fish, Bob Freeman, Michael Granof, Cindy Green, Jackie Reck (another current member), Paul Reilly, Robert Scott (whose first term just started in June), Marcia Taylor, and Jim Williams.

More to Come

This already is a longer post than I planned, so I think I will come back soon to talk about what my first year on the GASAC was like and the things that we talked about.

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