AGA's evaluation of the pilot determined that the PARs and AFRs/APRs serve another very important purpose: process improvement and discipline. The requirement to prepare the reports requires and drives the establishment and improvement of systems necessary to accumulate and report the information. This can produce several benefits.

To issue reports, agencies need to establish or at least improve information systems to accumulate and report the information.

In doing so, agency personnel gain considerable insight into their financial and program operations that they heretofore did not have.

Since stakeholders want the information used for decisionmaking and control to be accurate, reports provide a foundation for a self-assertion and/or an independent attestation of the information's reliability. This would not be available in the absence of the reports.

Since the person providing the assertion or attestation will not be able to check every item in the report, he or she will look to the agency's internal control to assure reliability. This will compel the organization to evaluate and assure that its controls are functioning properly.

Incidentally, the agencies that participated in the pilot for 2008 are not necessarily the same participating for 2009. For instance, Interior prepared an Agency Financial Report.

if you spent $30 MILLION a day every single day for 2000 years it would still not equal to obama’s $23.7 TRILLLION in financial bailouts

… the main reasons why people get poorer are because of higher taxes and inflation.