In April 2022, the Louisiana Supreme Court adopted Part G, General Administrative Rules, Section 15: Revenue and Expense Reporting. The rule states:
(a) The Judicial Administrator of the Supreme Court shall develop a uniform chart of accounts to be used by all courts of appeal and district, family, juvenile, parish, city, and municipal and traffic courts in preparing their financial statements in accordance with state law. From the uniform chart of accounts, the Judicial Administrator will develop a uniform reporting template to determine the categories reported in all court financial statements, including but not limited to revenues, expenses, and transfers.
(b) All revenues and expenditures of the court, including all of the court's sources of revenue and expenditures and all programs under the authority of the court, including but not limited to specialty courts, shall be submitted to the Louisiana Supreme Court, using the uniform reporting template, each year within six months of the end of the court's fiscal year or at the same time the court's financial statements are submitted to the legislative auditor, whichever comes first. The list of revenues and expenses shall be submitted using the categories on the chart of accounts discussed in Section (a) above.
(c) By the deadline set forth in R.S. 39:51(D), the supreme court shall submit a publicly available report containing all completed forms to the legislature and cause the completed forms to be published on its website.
In accordance with this rule and with input from several judges and court administrators, an interim uniform revenue and expense data collection form was prepared, which will be used utilized until a uniform chart of accounts is adopted.
The data collected in these forms create a snapshot and do not provide a full picture of a court's financial situation; when the uniform chart of accounts is complete, uniform categories will be incorporated into the reporting requirements of the Louisiana Legislative Auditor and the government-wide fund reporting required in the annual audit reports. (These annual audits can be found at the Louisiana Legislative Auditor's website and provide additional information about long-term liabilities and other notes on court finances that cannot be depicted in a single financial form.)
Please note that considerable changes were made to reporting requirements between 2021 and 2022. The 2021 reports provided data for the Supreme Court's fiscal year as they were connected to the Supreme Court's appropriation bill. However, in 2022 the reports were aligned with each court's audit cycle and will reflect the reporting period of their annual audits from this point onward. To further align this form with the auditing requirements and to provide the most thorough "snapshot," the revised forms (beginning in 2022) were modeled after the audited government funds "statement revenues, expenditures, and changes in fund balances" form.
Though all courts are unique and this uniqueness creates challenges for uniform reporting, we are continuing to work with courts statewide to make the collection and reporting of this data as easy as possible. We greatly appreciate the work of the judges, court administrators, and accounting professionals who have completed these reports and who continue to contribute to our uniform reporting efforts.
Please reach out to Rose Wilson of our Research & Development division, rwilson@lasc.org, (504) 310-2611 with any questions.
Act 116 of 2021, the judiciary appropriations bill, provided that the Supreme Court Judicial Administrator shall develop, distribute and publish a uniform budget document containing revenue and expense information provided by each district, city, traffic, and municipal court.
Links to the court reports are below. Please see the complete PDF report here for further information on the data-gathering process.
Although the parish courts and courts of appeal were not included in the Act 116 mandate, the Justices of the Supreme Court determined that the information from these courts would be valuable in court funding discussions both now and in the future, and included those courts in the information-gathering process. Reports from those courts are also included.
