Cities Have Themselves to Blame, Not COVID-19, for Sinkhole Status Municipal fiscal crises stem from long-standing unfunded liabilities The receding economic tide over this past year has revealed many city officials to be naked. Oft-forgotten amid the COVID-19 chaos is that their fiscal crises predated the virus’s spread. According to Truth in Accounting (TIA), a nonprofit fiscal watchdog, 62 of the 75 largest U.S. cities were already in the red in 2019. That statistic comes from the latest TIA “Financial State of the Cities” report (pdf), which came out in the last week of January. The authors’ objective is to provide citizens with easy-to-understand information and peer comparisons regarding their local governments’ finances.