Do troubled times invite cloudy budget reporting? The determinants of General Fund expenditure share in U.S. states

Fiscal controls require monitoring and transparent reporting. Financial documents with multiple funds, transfers, and inconsistent year-to-year categorization of revenues and expenditures provide opportunities to obscure a negative fiscal picture. We hypothesize that fiscal stress increases obfuscat...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings (Conference on Taxation) 2015-01, Vol.108, p.1-32
Main Authors: Hudspeth, Nancy, Merriman, David, Dye, Richard, Crosby, Andrew
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Balanced budgets
Budget deficits
Debt service
Federal budget deficit
Fiscal Rules, Transparency, and Accountability
Fund accounting
Government budgets
Government spending
Government transparency
State government
Total expenditures
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Fiscal controls require monitoring and transparent reporting. Financial documents with multiple funds, transfers, and inconsistent year-to-year categorization of revenues and expenditures provide opportunities to obscure a negative fiscal picture. We hypothesize that fiscal stress increases obfuscation. We investigate the relationship between the share of total governmental expenditures in U.S. states’ general funds and independent variables drawn from the literature. Consistent with our hypothesis, deficit and debt are the most important explanatory variables. A one standard deviation increase in the deficit as a share of total expenditures is predicted to decrease the general fund share by one percentage point.
ISSN:1549-7542
2377-5661