What do those figures mean? Are they of any real informative value or merely convenient things to have around when building the sub and superstructures of a department annual reports, like the figures of the postal deficits? A glance at the sums named in the table shows a variableness that amounts almost to a waywardness in totaling bills or accounts payable. The federal fiscal year ends June 30th. The annual reports of the Postoffice Department bear date December 1st--full four months after the close of the fiscal year. Surely four months is sufficient time to gather into account the bills payable or carried-over obligations of a previous year, is it not? Of course the business of the department is a large business--over $237,000,000 last year and about $260,000,000 is asked for this year in the appropriation bill recently passed by the House. But that is no reason whatever for failure to account for amounts ranging from $300,000 to $6,200,000 of unpaid bills of the business year in which the obligations were created; especially not, when publication of the accounting is made four months after the close of the year. This item of “expenditures on account of previous years” becomes no more understandable, if indeed it does not become more suggestive of purposeful manipulation, when one looks over the itemized or segregated expenditures of the year. The items of expenditure are all of the conventional character used in business accounting--operation and maintenance--such as service salaries, transportation of the mails, rents, light, fuel, supplies, repairs, etc. And these are all set down as expenditures of and for the fiscal year’s business covered by the report, there being not even a suggestion that any part or portion of the total is an expenditure of the previous year--of any previous year. So much for the detail of expenditures as published in the reports. From the summaries of receipts and expenditures one gathers no additional light. In the reports of the Third Assistant Postmaster General (division of accounts), one finds only the bald item, “Expenditures on account of previous years,” down to the report of Third Assistant, James J. Britt, for the year ended June 30, 1910. For that year Mr. Britt segregates the item as follows: Services for the fiscal year, 1909 $6,721,058.52 Services for the fiscal year, 1908 53,814.12 Services for the fiscal year, 1907 108.97 Claims, fiscal year, 1907 and prior years 11,605.44 Claims, fiscal year, 1906 and prior years 25.00 ------------ Total for prior years $6,786,394.11