Appropriations and Expenses Trend Analysis Assignment Instructions
Overview
Agency budgets consists of appropriations spent and expenditures for services delivered. The approved budget becomes an important device to monitor and evaluate spending and service delivery. Budget and finance officers must constantly monitor the relationship between appropriations and expenses. Evaluating agencies assists in understanding budgetary impact and internal infrastructure of efficiency and/or waste.
Instructions
For this assignment you will write an 8-10-pages (not including title page, reference page, and any appendices). More specifically, you will need to:
1) Compute and create tables and charts to analyze a three-year trend (2015, 2016, 2017) of selected appropriations and expenses for agencies within the Department of Homeland Security
2) Using the tables and charts, write an 8–10 paged, double-spaced, research paper that discusses and analyzes the relationship between appropriations and expenses.
The paper must be in current APA format with 1-inch margins and 12-pt Times New Roman font. You must also include a title page and reference page. You must include citations to a sufficient number of appropriate professional, scholarly, or other appropriate sources to fully support your assertions and conclusions (which will likely require more than the minimum number of citations); each paper must contain citations to the course texts book, assigned readings, and a minimum of 5 additional sources not including the course textbooks, assigned readings, and the Bible.
Remember that the assignment objectives are to show and discuss each trend as a percentage of the total budget allocated to each allocation or agencies and expense items, not the growth in dollars, constant or otherwise. If this is not addressed, the objectives of the project are not met.
Looking at the trend in constant dollars is not part of the requirements. While the trend in constant dollars is useful to know, it is not as important as knowing the percentage of the total budget allocated to each agency and expense items. For example, TSA could have had received an increase in appropriation, but percentage of the total budget allocated to it could have been decreased, if DHS received a large increase in its budget. That would be a significant finding.
Remember that a comparison between two years is a difference, not a trend.
you will need compute data in Excel, develop accurate professionally looking bar and pie charts, insert the accurate and professionally looking bar and pie charts in the appropriate places in the document and write the concluding comments that should focus on analyzing the data and charts ; (1) overall trends, (2) significance, and (3) implications of the trends as they relate to the warning trends. You will not be able to do that without following the directions precisely.
