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California — a state whose officials love to tout it as the world’s fifth largest economy — is late producing a report on its own financial health for the sixth year in a row. 

The most recently available such report, from 2022, blamed the chronic lateness of the reports on, among other things, a state software changeover that started in 2005, the year the first YouTube video was uploaded.

The state’s annual comprehensive financial report, which aims to provide insight into California’s financial health, is significant because it helps maintain the state’s credit rating, which is important in situations where the state might need to borrow money. 

While there isn’t a specific deadline for the reports under state law, bond certificates and federal funding require reporting by April 1 and March 31, respectively. State Controller Malia Cohen’s office said it typically tries to meet the March 31 deadline. 

This is the sixth consecutive year that the report missed those deadlines. The last available report is for the fiscal year that ended in 2022, published this past March.

Cohen’s office attributed the delay of the 2021-2022 report to the “unanticipated” extension of personal and corporate income taxes by both the federal government and California in 2023, as well as to ongoing challenges with agencies’ transition to FI$Cal, the state’s replacement budgeting and finance platform.

California launched the FI$Cal overhaul in 2005 to bring all of its budgeting and finance systems under one umbrella. If FI$Cal were a person, it would now be old enough to vote. The Legislature passed a bill to deem the project complete as of July 2022, but the state auditor noted that state agencies struggle to use the system.

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