Camber Helps Steve Ballmer Create a 10K For the USA

May 24

Have you ever wanted to know where the US federal, state and local governments get their money, how they spend it and how effective they are against what the Founding Fathers intended? Steve Ballmer did. He wanted the same “10K” report to investors that he relied upon as the CEO of Microsoft that gives a presentation to the public of the company’s results. Ballmer realized that a comprehensive view didn’t exist for the combined US governments, so he decided to create it himself - with help from Camber Consulting.

As a “numbers guy”, Ballmer wanted to understand data for the entire government, including the finances of all governments in a combined view - federal, state and local. Ballmer created a project called USAFacts, with an astonishingly ambitious goal to report on the financial position, results and key metrics of all US governments in an unbiased fashion.

"The 10K will appear every year. It should be read widely."

– The Economist, April 29th, 2017

*Steve Ballmer discusses the USAFacts project and 10K with Patrick Steel, CEO of Politico.*

To be an unbiased report, the 10K needed to be based on the governments’ publicly available data, and only the governments’ data. The intent is for Citizens to arrive at their own conclusions based on the data and have a common understanding about the validity and reliability of the data.

The 10K had to follow the rules of US Government’s SEC reporting requirements, to the extent possible for a government entity. The SEC has many rules and regulations about what must be included in the 10K, and what cannot be included. For example, the document must reflect the results and financial position of the organization and a narrative analysis in a manner that can be compared with other organizations. The report must not include guesses at future results, i.e. it cannot include forecasts which can be biased by politicians and officials. The intent is to provide stakeholders with the facts, and only the facts about the organization.

Adhering to these requirements demands deep understanding of the SEC rules and regulations, experience with applying these rules in many different scenarios and the ability to project manage the production of the document. In a project lasting many months, Camber helped organize relevant data and draft the 10K report from data compiled from government sources by the USAFacts’ team of researchers, economists and academics. Steve announced the release of the 10K and Annual Report with an “American Shareholder’s Meeting” on April 17, 2018 and various other press events.

We’re proud of our contribution to this civic-minded effort, the technical abilities of our team and their ability to deliver on such a grand scope. Click here to see the results of the USAFacts team’s work: