Control Patterns in State Budget Execution

A SIGNIFICANT development in state budgetary practices during past thirty years has been proliferation of centralized controls over expenditures after budget has been approved by legislature.' A. E. Buck's comprehensive study, Public Budgeting, published in 1929, contained only six pages on controls utilized in execution phase of budget.2 Yet, in 1959 Professor James W. Martin claimed that the most important area of decision-making is area of budget execution, not area of presentation of estimates or even area of legislative action.3 According to one state's estimate, execution consumes more than half working time of its budget staff.4 Other estimates obtained in conversations with budget officials attribute as much as 75 per cent of normal budget examiner's time to execution.