National Park Service

The national park system, which is run by the Park Service, manages nearly 370 units, including parks, monuments, and historic sites. In additional to annual appropriations, individual parks are allowed to keep money from in-park activities and accept other benefits from park support groups or concessioners. The funds going to the parks from these activities are not always subject to the annual congressional appropriations process. This report discusses (1) the sources and amounts of special account funds available throughout the Park Service system and, for a sample of parks, the amount of special account funds that were available to each of them and (2) whether the expenditures of funds in special accounts were consistent with the purposes for which those accounts were established.

GAO found that: (1) the value of the eight NPS accounts reviewed totalled $45 million; (2) five of these accounts recovered the costs associated with in-park activities and the other three provided cash and noncash benefits; (3) in 1994, cost-recovery accounts totalled $6.5 million and non-cost-recovery accounts totalled $38.5 million; (4) cost-recovery accounts are funded through living history demonstrations, reimbursements from mess operations, historical property leases, payments for park damages, and special-use fees for funding; (5) non-cost-recovery accounts receive funding from various donations and cooperating associations that operate bookstores on park premises; (6) the associations provide a variety of in-park services related to park themes and construct facilities that support concession services; (7) significant discrepancies exist between NPS and individual park financial data on the amount of funds in special accounts established by concessioners; (8) the actual amount of money in the special fund accounts is several million dollars higher than reported by NPS; (9) NPS attributes some of these discrepancies to inaccurate tracking of concessioners' accounts; and (10) all but one of the expenditures from the special fund accounts were for authorized purposes.