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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 were included. Products that are restricted or classified were not included.

GPO signed a partnership agreement with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to provide permanent public access to the GAO Reports database on the GAO Web site. Under this agreement, GAO agrees to provide storage capacity and user access without restrictions on re-dissemination.

The GAO database on GPO Access is provided as an archive of the content as it was at the time the agreement was signed on September 19, 2008. For these and more recent reports, visit the GAO Reports database on the GAO Web site. 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.

The GAO Reports application on GPO Access contains all publicly released GAO reports from FY95 to September 2008, as well as approximately 85% of the publicly released reports for FY94 and 3% for FY93. Reports are available as ASCII text and Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files.

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.