Municipal Financial Reporting on the World Wide Web: A Survey of Financial Data Displayed on the Official Websites of the 100 Largest U.S. Municipalities

This article documents the status of Internet financial reporting (budgets, CAFRs and popular reporting) by the 100 largest U.S. cities. This research is important to establish a baseline against which to compare the growth of Internet reporting in light of this new effort by the GFOA. The official website addresses of the 100 largest (based on population figures from the 2000 census) U.S. cities were obtained through a search of the World Wide Web. Eighty percent of the largest cities use the recommended domain name convention (www.ci. - city name. - state abbreviation.us). The largest cities were nearly twice as likely (68% to 38%) to present both budget and CAFR data while smaller cities were nearly twice as likely to present budget data alone (46% to 24%). This lack of enthusiasm for CAFR data may be due to a perception by officials of smaller cities that they have less need to provide external validation of their performance to their citizens.