Six Easy Steps to Normalize Toronto’s Operating Budgets

The widely and well understood (normalized) definition of an operating budget is: planned revenues, less planned expenses, leaving a planned operating surplus, which is distributed internally as needed (ie internal transfers). But the City of Toronto budget consists of only “revenues” and “expenditures”, which balance to zero. I use quotes around those terms because they are non-standard from a basic accounting perspective. They are non-standard because they conflate internal cash transfers with external revenues and expenses, and integrate multiple large accounting anomalies. First, here’s a summary of the normalized City budget. <a href="https://medium.com/@henrikbechmann/six-easy-steps-to-normalize-torontos-operating-budgets-cb8e101a0858">Website</a>