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GAO Reports: About
The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) is the investigative arm of Congress.
Its mission is to support Congress in meeting its Constitutional responsibilities
(e.g. oversight, policy, and funding decisions) and to help improve the
performance and accountability of the Federal Government for the American
people.
The GAO Reports application contains reports (“blue books”)
on audits, surveys, investigations, and evaluations of Federal programs
conducted by the GAO. Most reports are done at the request of members
of Congress — often committee chairpersons and ranking minority members.
All published reports, testimonies, correspondence, and special publications
are included. Products that are restricted or classified are not included.
The current fiscal year’s database is updated within two business
days of a report’s release. Products are posted to GAO's
Web site as PDF files the same day they are made public. Reports are available
as ASCII text and Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files.
The GAO Reports application on GPO Access contains all publicly
released GAO reports from FY95 to the present, as well as approximately
85% of the publicly released reports for FY94 and 3% for FY93. In addition,
GAO's
Web site contains summaries and full-text files (in PDF format) of reports
and testimony dating back to fiscal year 1979.
Each GAO Report is assigned a report number. Prior to FY01, report numbers
included the GAO division or office that performed the analysis (e.g.
HEHS-00-198R). Since FY01, all issuing division or office information
was removed from the report number and report numbers instead begin with
"GAO" (e.g. GAO-02-833T).
NOTE: Report numbers that end in “R” are correspondence
reports (e.g. HEHS-00-198R). These are narrower in scope, of more limited
interest, and without recommendations. Report numbers that end in “T”
indicate testimony (e.g. GAO-02-833T.
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