The Florida Legislative Committee on Intergovernmental Relations (LCIR)

Expenditures and Revenues Reported by Florida's Local Governments

Pursuant to Section 218.32, Florida Statutes, local government entities (i.e., counties, municipalities, and certain statutorily-defined independent special districts) shall submit annually a copy of its annual financial report (AFR) for the previous fiscal year to the Florida Department of Financial Services. The AFR shall be submitted in a format prescribed by the Department, which is known as the Uniform Accounting System – 2005 Edition. Each local government entity must submit a copy of its AFR no later than 12 months after its September 30th year end. The Department receives these reports and compiles the reported fiscal data.

At the request of the Florida Legislative Committee on Intergovernmental Relations (LCIR), the Department provides a copy of this annual data file to the Florida Legislature. The Legislature’s Office of Legislative Information Technology Services loads the annual update into a database containing such fiscal data for local fiscal years ended September 30, 1979 through the most recent annual update (currently - local fiscal year 2005). The Committee staff is able to access these historical expenditure and revenue data for use in policy research.

This webpage represents the Committee staff’s continuing efforts to make summary tabulations for individual local governments available to interested parties by providing hyperlinks to Microsoft Excel file downloads. The Committee staff makes no representation as to the accuracy of these fiscal data submitted by local governments to the Department. Since this webpage offers access to summary tabulations only, policy analysts and other researchers interested in the availability of complete datasets for a given fiscal year should contact the Department’s Bureau of Local Government.

Since the current (i.e., 2005) Uniform Accounting System Manual prescribes 168 individual expenditure and 226 individual revenue accounts, the LCIR's summary tabulations combine functionally-similar accounts into broad categories to facilitate comparison and analysis. In the LCIR's tabulations, total revenues equal the sum of the individual totals for each of the following broad categories: taxes, licenses and permits, intergovernmental revenues, charges for services, fines and forfeitures, and miscellaneous revenues. Other financing sources, such as interfund transfers-in, contributions from enterprise operations, debt proceeds, proceeds of refunding bonds, and other non-revenue receipts, are not included in these revenue tabulations. According to the Uniform Accounting System Manual, "revenues may be operationally defined in a governmental fund accounting context as all increases in fund net assets except those arising from interfund reimbursements, interfund operating and residual equity transfers or long-term debt issues."

In the LCIR's tabulations, total expenditures equal the sum of the individual totals for each of the following broad categories: general governmental services, public safety, physical environment, transportation, economic environment, human services, culture and recreation, and debt service. Other financing uses, such as interfund transfers-out and other non-operating uses, are not included in these expenditure tabulations. According to the Uniform Accounting System Manual, expenditures, "whether used in connection with the accrual or the modified accrual basis of accounting, denotes the costs of goods delivered or services rendered (whether paid or unpaid) including expenses, capital outlays, and the provisions of debt retirement where such debt is not reported as a liability of the fund from which it was retired."

Two tables are available that explain how the expenditure and revenue categories, as well as the classification of funds, in the LCIR’s summary tabulations reconcile to the applicable expenditure and revenue accounts listed in the Uniform Accounting System Manual.

Several reasons explain the time lag between the end of the local governments’ fiscal year and the availability of these fiscal data in summary form. Under current law, local government entities have up to 12 months after the end of the local fiscal year to submit their AFRs to the Department. The failure of local entities to submit AFRs to the Department within the time period established in law can further impede the data’s availability. Once the AFRs have been submitted, the Department’s staff must electronically compile these data prior to the transfer of such data to the Legislature. After the data have been made available to the Legislature and integrated into the database, LCIR staff begins the process of updating the summary tabulations for individual local governments.

Questions regarding the file downloads available on this webpage should be directed to LCIR staff.