GAO presented a compendium of fiscal year (FY) 2001 budget accounts to give users a convenient way to: (1) sort through the federal government's fiscal structure; and (2) determine the level of used, estimated, or requested budgetary resources 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.