• Same States, Same Cities, Same Story: Reason’s Study and the Taxpayer Burden

  September 25, 2026

  New independent analysis from the Reason Foundation reinforces a message Truth in Accounting has documented for years: many of America’s state and local governments look solvent on paper while their audited balance sheets tell a different story.

  Reason’s August 2026 policy study, State and local government finances in America: A comprehensive analysis of debt and liquidity, examines audited Annual Comprehensive Financial Reports from more than 20,000 governments. Using eight standardized metrics of long-term solvency and short-term liquidity, the authors assign “red flags” when a government exceeds an objective stress threshold. A single flag is a warning. A cluster signals a structural problem.

  That approach is different from Truth in Accounting’s Taxpayer Burden™ calculations, but it points to the same underlying reality. Officials routinely claim “balanced budgets” by counting only cash in and cash out. They leave off the costs already incurred for pensions, retiree health care, and other long-term promises. Those promises show up on the audited statements Reason used—and they are why so many governments fail both Reason’s tests and ours.

• Baltimore’s Housing Trust Can Count the Cash, It Still Can’t Count the Homes

  September 25, 2026

  In November 2016, Baltimore voters did something unusual: they wrote an affordable-housing lockbox into the City Charter. The Affordable Housing Trust Fund [AHTF] was supposed to take a dedicated stream of tax money and turn it into housing for the city’s lowest-income households. 

  The Charter even said how the public would know whether the city was keeping that bargain. Article I, Section 14 of the Charter gave the Commission two separate jobs, not one. It must “submit an annual report to the Mayor and City Council on the activities and usage of the funds, including tenure (rental and homeownership), income level served, and unit size (number of bedrooms), and make the report available to the public.” Separately, it must “ensure an audit of the fund every four years by a certified public accounting firm.” The four-year audit does not pause the annual report. The Commission must account for the money every year and have an independent CPA review the fund every four years. Both obligations run at the same time.

• Letter to Maryland's Comptroller Brooke Lierman

  September 18, 2026

  Thank you for your service to Maryland. I’m a CPA who started the nonpartisan organization Truth in Accounting (TIA) over 20 years ago with the sole mission to reveal governments’ true financial condition. TIA has analyzed Maryland’s audited Annual Comprehensive Financial Reports since 2009 and was recently engaged by local media outlets to review the state's audited financial statements. And because the Office of the Comptroller is a signatory to the accuracy and completeness of the data presented in those reports, we have questions we believe Maryland taxpayers deserve answered. Please respond by Tuesday, August 25 at noon.

• Baltimore Audit Finds a Bigger Problem Than Any Single Finding: Weak Controls Across the City

  September 8, 2026

  Baltimore’s 2025 Single Audit points to a broader problem than any one accounting error or compliance issue. Across the city’s finances, auditors repeatedly found the same underlying weaknesses: late reviews of account balances, fragmented responsibilities across departments, weak monitoring, and internal controls that failed to catch problems before year-end. Those breakdowns affected everything from cash and grant reporting to utility billing and cybersecurity.

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