I reached Chapter 10 of the interminable Accounting Principles and Standards Handbook of the Department of Commerce in the USA without finding anything amusing to write about. As you can imagine I was becoming discouraged, but then out of the blue, I found this enigmatic, but rather aggressive sentence:
“Unexpended appropriations include, but are not limited to, combinations of the unobligated allotment and unliquidated obligation accounts.”
What I wondered is an ‘unexpended appropriation’? The Department of Commerce in the sentence seems to say that an amount not yet expended equals unobligated amounts plus unliquidated amounts plus other amounts not yet defined yet. How enigmatic even disconcerting. A simpler definition must exist.
But I read on and found this example of an amount ‘obligated but not yet expended’: an undelivered order. At last something concrete; something the Department of Commerce wants but has not yet received, but decides to hide in governmental jargon.
Now because I am a British accountant educated in the UK it is natural that this threatening terminology is foreign to me. The equivalent British terms are equally unfathomable but less aggressive than the overwhelming ‘unexpended appropriation’.
In UK English an ‘unexpended appropriation’ might be called an unspent departmental allocation but the UK government use acronyms instead, calling it an unspent DEL amount. A DEL, of course, is a Departmental Expenditure Limit. But the said unspent amount can only be found in EYF of the DEL (End-of-Year Flexibility). Such clarity!!
To move on. An unobligated allotment in my language is an under spent budget. And nothing to do with the first thing which came to mind when I read it: a plot of land used for gardening (in the UK). Unliquidated obligation accounts, sometimes known as UOL, is an unspent amount of a signed contract. (Note how the Department of Commerce do not call it UOA [1] but UOL) The UK government seems not to need such detail for their unspent DEL.
The US government opts for aggressive terminology with a sprinkle of inaccurate acronyms. The UK government prefers multiple but accurate acronyms steeped in gentle terminology.
[1] University of Alberta, University of Auckland or University of Adelaide.