On the basis of accounts that tell in detailed classification the needs and the resources of the county, the governing body will be able to embark upon the financial voyage of each new year with chart and compass. At a stated time before the budget-making period the heads of departments, having before them the records of transactions and costs in previous years, will frame their requests for future service. But because of the exactness of the estimates required to be submitted, any request for an increase of appropriation will stand out as a shining mark. The department head will thereby be thrown on the defensive, will be obliged to explain himself. The knowledge of that condition will have a distinctly beneficial effect upon any desire of his to seek increased appropriations without careful consideration. The governing body will proceed, moreover, with the certitude that the public has at its disposal the means of knowing in detail what its government is costing. The business of the year will be treated as a program of public service; and in the framing of that program every interested citizen and group of citizens will be urged to take part through the medium of public hearings. As the Westchester County Research Bureau says: “It would be easy to provide an opportunity for the filing of either objections or additional suggestions by taxpayers and for consideration of these at public hearing at the county seat before the board of supervisors by public notice of such filing and of such public hearing. Such hearings would doubtless speedily end such abuses as are exemplified in our bulletin on the Purchase of County Supplies. In the face of public objection, few supervisors would vote affirmatively for appropriations for such extravagant expenditures. The difference in result would be that between the action of an informed public, able to deliberate in advance upon proposed expenditures, and the absence of action of a public ignorant of the character of such proposed expenditures--the usual condition under present methods of budget provision for public funds. “It is easy to prevent the official adoption over public objection of extravagant estimates. It is difficult to prevent extravagant misuse of public funds appropriated in lump sums, or to rectify such misuses after such expenditures have been incurred.”[24] Complete knowledge and complete mutual confidence and understanding on the part of the public on the one hand and its agencies of government on the other--that is the big and seemingly reasonable promise of a budget system of the right sort. It cannot be put into operation in the fullest extent without those structural changes in county government with which we have already dealt. AUDITING AND PURCHASING