The Evolution of Accounting for Receipts in the Federal Budget

This article discusses the fundamental concepts governing budget scorekeeping of federal receipts. It is a companion to a previous article that discussed "offsetting collections," which is income that is recorded as offsets to federal outlays rather than as federal receipts. This article begins by showing the structure of the receipts table in the first presidential budget, which was the 1923 budget, and it provides a chronological discussion of how the budget presentation of receipts has evolved since then. The article then recapitulates the present budget concepts for receipts and lists the five most common challenges to them. It ends with a brief reference to the best sources for data on federal receipts, and two appendices that discuss technical issues that arise in the course of the article.