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 comprehensive annual 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.
Popular annual financial reports submitted to the PAFR Program are reviewed by selected members of the GFOA professional staff and by outside reviewers with experience in governmental accounting and financial reporting.