Joe Doakes from Como Park wrote last week:
On this day in 1778 – The Continental Congress passes the first budget of the United States.
The last budget of the United States was proposed by the Senate on April 29, 2009.
So have generally accepted accounting principles become obsolete or are they simply being ignored and if so, by whom and why?
Joe Doakes,
Como Park
Once it goes past “Quicken”, I’m lost…
It’s worth noting that Congress generally exempts government programs from GAAP, and when they don’t–as in requiring the Post Office to actually fund their pensions–all Hell breaks loose among the government unions.
Not sure that actually passing a budget is a GAAP requirement, though. Good practice, yes, because not passing a budget provides a neat way to evade the principles of openness that pervade GAAP, but I’m not sure if GAAP requires a budget, or whether it simply requires basic standards of honest accounting.
GAAP doesn’t apply to the government, so this line of argument is moot. I thought there was a tiny glimmer of hope with the Contract with America, whereby Congress was obliged to live by the same rules it promulgated for the country, but that’s not much help here, because a government is presumed to have a longer lifespan than a corporation, and hence should have different accounting rules applied to it.
With that said, the failure of Congress to pass a budget for the last three years would, one would think, get a bit more play than it has.