transparency

Texas State Expenditures by County 2013

Introduction

Texas State Expenditures by County 2013 continues the annual reporting of state agency spending by county begun in 1991, when the General Appropriations Act first required the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts to prepare these reports.

Section I contains a summary of net expenditures by county for major spending categories; a summary and ranking of net expenditures by county; and a table of detailed state expenditures by county. Section II presents similar information by council of governments region. In both sections, some expenditures are listed as “unallocable” to Texas counties. Unallocable expenditures include payments to out-of-state and foreign vendors and payments that cannot be assigned to a specific county.

This report lists state agencies under each county and planning region in numerical order by their assigned agency code. For reference, this report includes an alphabetical list of state agencies in Section I-A. A map of Texas counties and a list of counties by state planning region are in Section II-A.

This report includes only net expenditures as reflected in the Uniform Statewide Accounting System (USAS). Net expenditures include purchases of goods and services made from accounts held by the Comptroller of Public Accounts’ Treasury Operations, those in the state’s General Revenue Fund and from all special funds and trust funds. This report does not include funds maintained outside the Treasury Operations accounting system or funds held by universities in local banks. Net expenditures in this report exclude purchases of investments; some payments from trust or suspense accounts, such as allocations of local sales taxes to cities, counties and transit authorities; benefit payments to retired teachers and state employees; and all types of interfund transfers and repayments of debt principal.

The report presents net expenditures made from a cash accounting system during fiscal 2013, from Sept. 1, 2012 to Aug. 31, 2013. Accrued expenses and encumbrances to counties continue to improve with each reporting period; therefore, the data in this report may not be consistent with data in reports from prior years.

In some cases, an expenditure category may include a negative amount. This may indicate a payment made in a previous fiscal year that has been partially or wholly refunded or may reflect a minor processing error that was corrected. Due to rounding, some category totals listed in the introduction’s Major Spending Categories table may not match totals in the Summary of County Expenditures.