Compendium of Budget Accounts

Each year, the President is required by law to submit a budget to Congress. In effect, the President's budget analyzes and compiles separate presentations for hundreds of budget accounts, covering all fiscal activities of the federal government, including such "off-budget" accounts as the Social Security Trust Funds and the Postal Service Fund. The budget comprises a wealth of information in a daunting array of schedules, tables, graphs, and narrative summaries. The comprehensiveness of the President's budget is its main strength, but it also accounts for its most obvious weaknesses--its sheer size and complexity. For example, for fiscal year 1998, the President's budget spans six volumes and more than 2,400 pages. This compendium provides users with a convenient way to sort through the fiscal structure of the federal government and to determine the level of budgetary resources--used, estimates, or requested by fiscal year--for individual accounts.

GAO noted that: (1) this compendium follows the same organizational pattern as the Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 1998 Appendix; (2) account summaries for the legislative and judicial branches precede listings for the executive branch, which is organized alphabetically by major department and agency, followed by other independent agencies; (3) individual accounts are then grouped by major subordinate organization, usually a bureau, service, or administration, or by major program area; (4) for each account, GAO reports gross obligations in millions of nominal dollars; (5) gross obligations reflect a financial estimate of orders placed, contracts awarded, services received, and other similar transactions during the fiscal year; (6) GAO selected gross obligations as the display criterion because it best describes the relative size of each budget account, expressed in terms of financial commitments made within a given fiscal year, without regard to the type of underlying budgetary resource or when resulting outlays may occur; (7) in addition to the account title and budgetary data by fiscal year, GAO has appended two additional codes to each account to enhance utility; (8) to provide perspective on mission or purposes, each account includes a code reflecting the budget function or subfunction most directly associated with the transactions financed by that account; (9) a general description of each function is provided in Appendix I and a summary of gross obligations by subfunction is provided at the beginning of the account listing for each major department and agency; (10) GAO has coded each account by the cognizant congressional appropriations subcommittee to clarify the focus of congressional oversight for the specific budget account; (11) for presentation purposes, the Appendix occasionally merges or consolidates separate accounts under a single account title; (12) beginning with the FY 1997 budget submission, financial information in the Appendix was rounded to the nearest million rather than nearest thousand; (13) for financial management purposes, the Department of the Treasury assigns a unique account code to each separate appropriation within an appropriations act; (14) because of consolidations and merges, the President's submission typically presents a smaller universe of accounts than that tracked by the Treasury; and (15) the account-level data in this compendium was extracted from automated information collected and maintained by the Office of Management Budget as part of its process to develop the President's FY 1998 submission.