Discussion: Proprietary and Fiduciary Funds
Using your CAFR from Module One (New York City CAFR) I attach in previous homework post.
1. Discuss your government's proprietary funds and/or fiduciary funds in your initial post.
2. Specifically, what activities are covered in those funds?
3. Did you find anything confusing about the funds?
Here are samples of classmates post related to this questions:
Sample 1.
The City of San Antonio has two types of Proprietary Funds: Enterprise Funds and Internal Services Funds. Enterprise Funds are primarily used to keep track of the "business-like" activities performed by the unit of government. "The City uses enterprise funds to account for its Airport System, Development Services, Market Square, Parking System, and Solid Waste Management," (City of San Antonio, 2015). While Internal Services Funds are used to collectively keep up with all the costs allocated among the City functions internally.
Fiduciary Funds, on the other hand, "are used to account for resources held for the benefit of parties outside the primary government," (City of San Antonio, 2015). These types of resources could be considered to be pensions and different investment fund accounts such as municipal bonds or real estate.
Sample 2.
Calvert County, MD uses propietary fund, or enterprise funds, are used to keep track of the business-like activities that are preformed by the govenment of Calvert County. These funds account for water, sewer, solid waste, and recycling. The fiduciary funds are used by Calvert County to account for resources that are held for the benefit of entities outside of the government. The accounting for this fund is similar to the proprietary fund but are not presented on the government-wide financial statements because the funds are not used to support the county's own programs. There are two types of fiduciary funds, trust funds and agency funds. The trust funds is maintained for the Volunteer Fire Departments, Rescue Squads,Sheriff's Department pension plans and the Calvert County employee's retirement and post-employment benefit plans. The agency fund is maintained for the use of tax payments made by property owners in delinquency to redeem tax certificates that are held by third parties.
According to the 2015 CAFR, the net position of this fund increased by $4.8 million; the unrestricted net position for the Water and Sewer fund was $2.8 million and the Solid Waste and Recycling Fund was $3.5 million. Additionally, proprietary fund revenue increased by $1.6 million.
I think both funds are pretty straight forward and on Calvert County's CAFR they are pretty well spelled out.