ABSTRACT
Governments often understate the costs of a program by unintentionally overlooking expenses that do not show up in that program’s annual budget. Perhaps the overlooked expenses appear on the pages of a different program; perhaps they are overhead expenses that are absorbed elsewhere; perhaps they are capital expenses that are not reported for this year because the expenditure was made last year, not this year. To know what is being spent on a program, all of these expenses and others must be included.
