Compendium of Budget Accounts

The President is required by law to submit a budget to Congress each year. This budget not only presents the President's policy proposals for the "budget year," in this case fiscal year 2001, but also budgetary totals enacted by Congress for the current fiscal year and reported actual totals for the previous year. In effect, the President's submission analyzes and compiles separate presentations for hundreds of budget accounts spanning the activities of the entire federal government, including such "off-budget" programs as Social Security and the Postal Service. The President's budget contains a wealth of information in a daunting assemblage of schedules, tables, graphs, and narrative summaries. The comprehensiveness of the President's budget--its sheer size and complexity--is both its principal strength and its most obvious inconvenience. This budget compendium was compiled to help GAO staff and others cope with the breadth of the federal budget. It gives readers a convenient way to sort through the fiscal structure of the federal government and to understand the level of budgetary resources--used, estimated, or requested by fiscal year--for individual accounts.

GAO noted that: (1) the compendium has the same organizational arrangement as the appendix to the Budget of the United States Government, FY 2001; (2) gross obligations are reported for each account, since these figures best describe each budget account's relative size in terms of financial commitments made within a given fiscal year; (3) codes reflecting the accounts' related budget function or subfunction and cognizant congressional appropriations subcommittees, and authorizing subcommittees where appropriate, are included to enhance the compendium's utility; (4) for presentation purposes the appendix occasionally merges or consolidates separate accounts under a single account title; (5) beginning with the FY 1997 budget submission, financial information in the appendix was rounded to the nearest million rather than nearest thousand; (6) this resulted in numerous account title changes as accounts below $500,000 were consolidated or merged with larger accounts; and (7) listings of zero gross obligations in given fiscal years may reflect newly authorized, second-year, consolidated, or terminated accounts.