Footnotes

In July 2011, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) issued Accounting Standards Update 2011-07, Health Care Entities (Topic 954), Presentation and Disclosure of Patient Service Revenue, Provision for Bad Debt, and the Allowance for Doubtful Accounts for Certain Health Care Entities. The amendments in the Update change the presentation of the statement of operations. The provision for bad debts for patient service revenue is required to be presented on a separate line as a deduction from patient service revenue. The new presentation will show net patient service revenue that is...

Category: Accounting, Merritt Data

Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) is a set of accounting principles, standards and procedures that organizations use to compile their financial statements. GAAP is a collection of authoritative standards set by policy boards such as the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) or the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB). GASB is responsible for setting accounting standards for state and local governments and their governmental agencies, while FASB is responsible for setting accounting standards for all other organizations, including nongovernmental, nonprofit...

Category: Accounting

Demographic trends can paint a vivid picture of a state or local economy, often contributing to changes in a Credit's finances. The CreditScope database includes demographic data compiled from three sources: the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), and the U.S. Census Bureau. Census Bureau information is comprised of the Decennial Census of Population and the American Community Survey (ACS), which "surveys a small percentage of the United States to produce yearly estimates on the nation's social, economic, and housing characteristics." Merritt is...

Category: CreditScope, Demographics, Merritt Data

The Current Portion of Long-Term Debt [CurPorLTD] field is populated with the scheduled principal payments for debt that is issued on a long-term basis - i.e., debt which is not due in its entirety within the next fiscal year. This field would also include any accelerated payments due to default or noncompliance. The Short-Term Debt field can be found in the database as [STD] for most revenue-backed sectors or [STDGov] for most tax-backed sectors. It is populated with short-term debt that is outstanding at fiscal year end. The field does not account for any short-term borrowings that were...

Category: CreditScope, Merritt Data

A Primer on Merritt's Approach to Tax-Backed Debt Statements Generating consistent, accurate, and comparable financial information is of the utmost importance to Merritt Research Services. In order to achieve this goal, it is paramount that we clearly define each of our fields. Nowhere is this more important than the debt analysis section of the tax-backed sectors. These fields are often difficult to standardize due to the variations of presentation and the abundance of long term debt vehicles available to municipal issuers. Regardless of the presentation, the guidelines below should help...

Category: CreditScope, Merritt Data

Merritt Research Services strives to paint the most accurate picture of a Credit's financial condition based on information provided in audited financial statements and notes contained therein. Because the dollar amount of Cash & Short Term Investments is used to calculate several salient liquidity ratios in the CreditScope database, it is particularly important to note that only unrestricted and highly liquid cash and short-term investments are included in this field. Merritt typically does not include any cash reserved for collateral, held by fiscal agents, or trustee-held restricted...

Category: CreditScope, Merritt Data

Merritt Research Services provides tax base data for credits within the City, County, and School District sectors. Tax base data is found in the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) in the Statistical Section, which typically provides an abundance of information relating to economics and demographics. When entities do not provide tax base data in their CAFR, Merritt will utilize public documents from other sources, including Official Statements and Continuing Disclosure Documents which may be obtained through Electronic Municipal Market Access (EMMA). Tax base data provides an...

Category: CreditScope, Merritt Data

Merritt Research Services aggregates salient credit information by locating, obtaining, providing, and following an audit or fund contained in a Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) that best represents the source of payment for currently outstanding municipal bonds. Those efforts have established a universe of Credits (often referred to as obligors) in the Merritt data set. Merritt takes great care in establishing the association ("link") between an Issue or group of Issues associated with a given Credit. Generally, specific bond issues are linked based on the revenues...

Category: CreditScope

Merritt Research Services aims to provide the most comprehensive collection of data possible. In some instances, however, adequate disclosure has not been provided by the Credit. In those cases, certain data fields will be left blank. Blank data fields are not to be confused with zeros, which indicate a zero balance or value. In addition to insufficient disclosure, fields might also be left blank when data for a particular field is not broken out in enough detail for us to populate the respective field accurately. This situation might arise if a line item on a financial statement is combined...

Category: CreditScope, Merritt Data

Merritt Research Services has developed strenuous quality control procedures throughout the data gathering, extraction, entry, review and grooming processes. We believe that the reputation of our data relies heavily on the quality control procedures that we employ in each step of the data process. ...Data Gathering Along with audit request letters, Merritt sends a survey requesting key industry accepted operating statistics. To ensure consistency, we include a set of definitions and the prior year's statistics to function as a guideline for the borrower to use when completing the survey...

Category: Merritt Data