Service Efforts and Accomplishments

              Traditional governmental financial reporting and
budgeting are designed to report to the public on
how financial resources are acquired and used by
governments and to ensure that resources made
available to state agencies are used in accordance
with the laws and policies enacted by the General
Assembly and the Governor. How many people
did we employ, and how much equipment did we
purchase? How many more will we use this year
than we did last year? Did expenditures fall
within the amounts appropriated? These are the
types of questions answered by these traditional
financial practices.
Missing from the traditional financial practices,
however, is a review of how well our state agencies
use their resources to accomplish the assignments
given them in the laws and policies set by elected
officials. What, in the broad sense, did taxpayers get
for the money they spent? Were resources used
effectively? Are our children well schooled? Are our
highways safe and efficient? Do we do a good job of
keeping our air and water clean?
One of the priorities of my administration is to
improve the accountability of state governmental
agencies to the public they serve. That is, to make
sure that state resources are spent for the proper
purposes, but also to report on the efficiency,
effectiveness, and outcomes of government
programs. To this end, the Comptroller has launched
the Public Accountability Project, which, in
cooperation with the Governor’s Office of Strategic
Planning, has instituted a process by which state
agencies annually report on their performance in
carrying out their statutory missions. The effect of
this type of performance reporting is two-fold. First,
state agencies become more customer-oriented and
therefore more effective. Second, the public will
become more aware of the missions and
accomplishments of state agencies.
The instrument for this process is Service Efforts and
Accomplishments (SEA) Reporting as ordained by
the Governmental Accounting Standards Board
(GASB), the agency designated to set standards for
financial reporting by state and local governments.
Recognizing the incompleteness of traditional
financial reporting, the GASB has begun an initiative
to stimulate SEA reporting by state and local
governments. The goal of SEA reporting is to
improve financial reports by linking information on
the performance of government programs with the
usual financial data. SEA reporting examines not
only the financial resources allocated to programs,
but their missions and goals - plus quantifiable
measurements of how they have met those missions
and goals. The GASB is promoting experimentation
by governments under their purview before issuing
standards on SEA reporting. Illinois has been
designated by the GASB as an official
“experimentation site” for SEA reporting.
Expanded SEAReporting for Fiscal Year 1999
This year’s SEA report is the third issued by the
Illinois Office of the Comptroller, but it is the first
done under a formalized reporting process initialized
with the top state agencies in Illinois government.
That, along with an effort to expand the range of
information, makes for a larger, expanded report.
Formal reporting process. With the cooperation of
the Governor’s Office of Strategic Planning, the
Comptroller initiated a process to incorporate nineteen
of the largest departments and agencies in state
government into the SEA reporting system. Together
the budgets of these nineteen agencies represent over
85% of the state budget for fiscal year 1999.
The first SEA Reporting Conference in Illinois State
government, conducted with the assistance of the
Department of Accountancy at the University of
Illinois at Springfield, began a process of preparing
these selected agencies to compile their performance
reports. With input and direction from the Office of
the Comptroller and the Governor’s Office of
Strategic Planning, the agencies chose key programs
Service Efforts and Accomplishments (SEA)
Background
The Public Accountability Project
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