Popular Annual Financial Reporting Award Program
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.
Important Announcements
- Beginning June 6, 2022, submissions to the PAFR program will be processed in GFOA’s Awards Management System (AMS).
- Email submissions will no longer be accepted.
- If you receive the below error message when attempting to log into the AMS Forms page (and you have successfully logged in previously), please try clearing your browser's cache/cookies or use a new web browser AND use this link: https://lf.gfoa.org/Forms to resolve this issue. We recommend using Firefox or Chrome. If the issue persists, kindly use the Contact Us form for further assistance. Your patience is greatly appreciated!
Submitting an Application
How to Submit an Application
Check Status of an Application
Obtain AMS Login Credentials
Eligibility
Fee Schedule
Questions about the PAFR Program?
Retrieve Results
Request an extension to the PAFR Program
Judging Process
Eligible reports are reviewed by three judges, who complete an evaluation form specifically designed for this purpose. The judge’s evaluation form is comprised of five categories that are given varying weights of importance toward the overall evaluation:
- Reader appeal (25%),
- Understandability (40%),
- Distribution methods (5%),
- And other (e.g., creativity, notable achievement) (10%).
- The remaining 20% of the score is based upon overall quality and usefulness of the report, taking into consideration the four previous categories.
Judges are never selected from the same state as the PAFR being reviewed or from the same firm that performed the independent audit of the annual comprehensive financial report.
Staff tabulates the results of the reviews of the judges. Any PAFR with at least 2 of the 3 judges rating the report as Partially satisfy (3), Good (4) or Excellent (5) in all categories weighted at 20% or higher (i.e., in the reader appeal, understandability, and overall impression categories) is granted the award.