This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, December 30th, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Government Accounting Standards Board, or GASB, effectively sets rules for how many state governments run the numbers for dozens of programs.

Now a new bit of guidance from GASB will compel many states to begin reporting direct

preferences and subsidies given to companies and individuals. Will Freeland with the American Legislative Exchange Council discusses what the new reporting means.

GASB recently released after sort of a year-long commenting and drafting process statement 77 which is sort of supposed to go after

text carve-outs.

So originally a lot of folks thought that what they were going to be going after was sort of

the type, making states put out the type of report

that the federal government has to put it every year, which reports every single thing

that could sort of theoretically be part of the code that's chopped out, accounting for that, saying

what it is and how much it is.

So carved out of the code, meaning a special exemption to some tax or fee that they would otherwise have to pay.

That's right.

It could be everything from one thing that the on the federal level, the joint committee on taxation they even look at health care

exempted from the income tax code but on the you know the farther end they look at things

like if you get a hybrid credit or things like that, all of these credits, the earned income tax credit,

they do an accounting for it.

And the states often do a very poor job of accounting for these.

We don't know how much there is.

We don't even know what the programs are and so a lot of people

have been complaining about this how little sunlight there is for so long how

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