3.23 Liquor Stores Sector
This sector covers only the liquor store systems owned and
operated, at present, by seventeen state governments and local
governments in a few states. Any associated government
activities, such as licensing and enforcement of liquor laws and
collection of liquor taxes, are classified in the general
government category.
3.24 Insurance Trust Sector
The insurance trust sector comprises two major groups of systems:
- Public employee retirement systems, embracing both contributory
and noncontributory systems administered by a government
for public employees (including employees of other governments).
- Social insurance systems, including the Federal Government's
Social Security and Medicare program (OASDHI), veterans' life
insurance, and railroad retirement; and state government
workers' compensation and
miscellaneous insurance trusts. Note that for Census Bureau
purposes these types of social insurance systems are not
applied to local government finances (other than for the
District of Columbia's unemployment compensation plan).
To be categorized as a insurance trust for purposes of Census
Bureau statistics, a system must meet all five characteristics of
a social insurance trust described in
Section 11.1.
Note that the insurance trust category applies only to the
government actually administering the system. A government's
participation in an insurance trust administered either privately
or by another government is not treated as an insurance trust
activity of the participating government. Generally, it would be
treated as a current operations expenditure for the paying
activity in the general government, utilities, or liquor stores
sector.
No employment activity is associated with this sector; employees
involved in administering insurance trust systems are classed in
the general government sector.
3.3 How Census Bureau Statistics Relate to Original Data Sources
Federal, state, and local governments issue their own reports and
financial statements, sometimes in great detail. The Census
Bureau often relies on these reports or on the accounting or
payroll reporting systems that generate them as a major source of
its statistics (see Note 2). Despite the use of the governments' own reports
or reporting systems, Census Bureau statistics produced from them
often do not agree with those issued by the governments
themselves.
The major reason for this seeming disparity is one of the major
purposes of this classification system: to provide finance and
employment statistics that are consistent for all governments
surveyed. Governments differ greatly in their size, activities,
organization, responsibilities, and the internal methods they use
to report them. The financial structure and reporting systems
devised by governments also differ widely, being designed mainly
to enforce fidelity and to help officials to plan and administer
the affairs of the government effectively.
Amongst this diversity, the Census Bureau collects statistics
which must be presented in a consistent and uniform manner for
all governments covered. Thus, a government's original data are
re-categorized within a standard framework based on the common
nature of particular activities or transactions in order to
overcome barriers to both useful summation and direct comparisons
that result from the varied nature of government records and
reports.
Thus, the Bureau often recasts the data extracted from original
sources in the ways described below.
3.31 Federal Government Statistics
The primary focus of Census Bureau statistics about governments
is on state and local governments. Data for the Federal
Government are collected for some surveys, primarily to provide a total
picture of government activity in the national economy.
The classification system used by the Census Bureau for
categorizing state and local government activities differs in a
number of important respects from the classification scheme used
in the United States Budget (the primary source of Federal
Government finance data). Accordingly, it is necessary to recast
Federal data as presented in this source to produce statistics
that are consistent with those for state and local governments.
This involves (1) grouping individual Federal receipts and
expenditures for various agencies and appropriations according to
the functional framework described in Chapter 4
and (2) applying certain adjustments to many of those items to
derive finance amounts consistent with those reported for state and
local governments. These adjustments take into account the following
major differences between the Federal reporting scheme and the
Census Bureau's classification system.