Anyone taking the trouble to add the five amounts given above, will discover an error of $217.94 in the total. While that error is only a trifle, its appearance, however, in the addition of but five items is not highly commendatory of the ability of Mr. Britt’s expert accountants. The making of such an error in totaling only five entries has a tendency to arouse doubt or suspicion as to the reliability or dependability, not only of the footings given for the longer tabulations published in the report, but also of the footings which must necessarily have been made to secure the totals which are entered as items in such tabulations. Be this as it may, very few persons, aside from clerks paid for doing the work (and, possibly, an official or two whose duty it is or should be to see that the work is done accurately), will go to the trouble to verify even the footings of the published tabulations. So the errors, if any have been made, are not likely to become subject matter for much adverse criticism. My purpose in presenting the showing of the 1910 report on that item of “expenditure on account of previous years” is to make the statement that, so far as I have been able to look up the matter, it is a first weak attempt to make public in the annual report the accounts and claims carried over from a previous year or years and published as expenditures of the year to which they are carried. I desire the reader to note, also, that of the total of “expenditures on account of previous years” ($6,786,612.05 as above corrected), all but $65,553.53 is set down as expenditures for the year _immediately prior_--for 1909. Now, the business of the Postoffice Department is a cash business--wholly so in the matter of receipts and nearly so, or should be, in the matter of expenditures. This being the case, that item entered in the published annual reports as “expenditures on account of previous years” must consist largely of payments made on account of the year _immediately preceding_ the year covered by the report. As just shown by the published analysis of the item in the 1910 report, the expenditures on account of prior years other than the one just preceding are so small (only $65,553.53 in a total of $6,786,612.05), that they may be ignored in the attempt I am shortly to make, to show that the item we have been considering--“expenditures on account of previous years”--has such dominance in the department’s method of accounting, as evidenced in its annual reports, as to materially affect the deficit or surplus showing. First, however, I desire to call attention to another point or two relating to this item of expenditure.