The Governmental Accounting Standards Board has proposed changing the term “comprehensive annual financial report” to “annual comprehensive financial report” because the abbreviation sounds like a racist term in South Africa.
Some of GASB’s constituents have noted that the common acronym for the report, typically abbreviated as CAFR, when spoken, sounds too much like an offensive term to many people. After asking for input from different groups of stakeholders, GASB added a project to its technical agenda last December to air those concerns.
Awareness of racial justice issues has been growing in the accounting profession, especially after the protests last year over the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. While the term that GASB is seeking to rename may not evoke racist connotations as much in the U.S., it does sound like an ethnic slur that was often used in Africa, particularly in apartheid-era South Africa.
“When you pronounce the acronym, it is a highly offensive racial slur directed toward Black South Africans,” GASB Chair Joel Black said in a statement Tuesday. “As we and our stakeholders are part of a global community, we do not wish to be offensive to anyone, so we have undertaken the project to address this.”
GASB’s exposure draft,
