City of Paducah Receives First Ever Award for Popular Annual Financial Report

Date of Release: 
July 15, 2024

Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA) has awarded the Outstanding Achievement in Popular Annual Reporting Award to the City of Paducah for its Popular Annual Financial Report (PAFR) for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2023. This is the first year for Paducah to create the PAFR and achieve the prestigious award. Stop by Paducah City Hall at 300 South 5th Street to pick up a copy of the PAFR, or click the link to read the report.

Read the Popular Annual Financial Report

Paducah’s PAFR is a 12-page report that summarizes financial data in a user-friendly format to increase awareness and knowledge of Paducah’s operations. For the past 33 consecutive years, the City has received a separate award from GFOA, the Certificate of Achievement for Excellence in Financial Reporting, for the City’s 200-page ACRF, a more comprehensive document that includes the city’s audit.

Mayor George Bray said, “As part of the City of Paducah’s commitment to fiscal responsibility and transparency, the Finance Department proactively developed documents that share the City’s financial story with the community in an open and understandable manner. Those efforts are being recognized by this Outstanding Achievement Award, and I want to thank the City of Paducah’s Finance Department for their never-ending commitment to providing a transparent look at the City’s finances. Paducah was successful in taking complex financial information and reducing it to a user-friendly format for the benefit of our citizens.”

City Manager Daron Jordan said, “Fiscal responsibility is one of the City of Paducah’s organizational values. During the budget process each year, we spend a considerable amount of time reviewing revenues, expenditures, debt liabilities, and more. In addition to sharing Paducah’s financial story through the annual budget book and ACFR, this new document, the Popular Annual Financial Report, provides a streamlined overview of Paducah’s financial operations. I encourage the community to review the document as we show our commitment to citizens that we value their trust in us to be good financial stewards of public dollars.”

The report was judged by an independent panel to meet the program’s high standards which include clearly communicating the City’s financial story. Judges reviewed the document’s understandability and reader appeal among other factors.

Finance Director Jonathan W. Perkins said, “Achieving the Outstanding Achievement award for the PAFR is an honor since the GFOA is an organization known for its commitment in selecting only those entities that meet the highest standards in government reporting. I must thank City of Paducah Controller Audra Kyle for compiling the PAFR. Taking complex financial data and reducing the information into this 12-page, visually appealing document was a challenging task.”

The GFOA established the Popular Annual Financial Reporting Awards Program (PAFR Program) in 1991 to encourage and assist state and local governments to extract information from their annual comprehensive financial report to produce high quality popular annual financial reports specifically designed to be readily accessible and easily understandable to the general public and other interested parties without a background in public finance and then to recognize individual governments that are successful in achieving that goal.

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