leeroy-jankins/OMB-Circular-A11-Section-120-Apportionment-Process

Dataset Description

The OMB Circular A-11 Section 120 Apportionment Process Question Answering Dataset is a document-grounded collection of 150 question-and-answer records concerning the federal apportionment process administered by the Office of Management and Budget.

The dataset was developed from Section 120, “Apportionment Process,” of OMB Circular No. A-11, Preparation, Submission, and Execution of the Budget. Section 120 is part of the Circular’s budget-execution instructions and explains the policies, responsibilities, timing requirements, forms, categories, footnotes, and administrative procedures associated with apportioning federal budgetary resources.

Apportionment is a central control in federal budget execution. It divides amounts available for obligation into specified time periods, activities, projects, objects, combinations of those categories, or other approved limitations. The process is intended to prevent obligations or expenditures from occurring at a rate that would require a deficiency or supplemental appropriation and to support the effective and orderly use of federal resources.

Each dataset record contains a natural-language question and a detailed answer grounded in Section 120. The questions are designed to test substantive understanding rather than simple identification of page numbers, subsection labels, form lines, or document locations. Each answer contains at least five complete sentences and is written to provide enough context to be understood independently.

The dataset may support supervised fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation, federal-budget question answering, budget-execution training, semantic retrieval, document comprehension, and evaluation of systems that answer questions about federal fiscal policy and administrative guidance.

Dataset Summary

Attribute	Value
Domain	Federal budget execution and apportionment
Source organization	United States Office of Management and Budget
Source publication	OMB Circular No. A-11
Source section	Section 120—Apportionment Process
Source type	Executive-branch budget guidance
Language	English
Number of records	150
Primary task	Document-grounded question answering
Secondary task	Instruction-oriented text generation
Answer length	At least five sentences per record
Data type	Structured textual question-and-answer pairs
Generation method	Human-directed synthetic dataset generation
External knowledge required	No

Source Material

The dataset is based on:

Office of Management and Budget. OMB Circular No. A-11: Preparation, Submission, and Execution of the Budget. Section 120, “Apportionment Process.”

OMB Circular No. A-11 provides government-wide instructions for preparing, submitting, and executing the President’s Budget. Section 120 specifically addresses the apportionment of budgetary resources and the responsibilities of executive agencies and OMB during that process.

The dataset should be associated with the exact edition of Section 120 used during record generation. OMB periodically revises Circular No. A-11, and later editions may modify deadlines, submission procedures, terminology, automatic-apportionment rules, system requirements, or other instructions.

Dataset Scope

The dataset is intended to cover the major substantive areas addressed by Section 120.

Purpose of Apportionment

Records may address:

• The purpose of the federal apportionment process.
• Prevention of deficiencies.
• Prevention of obligations at an excessive rate.
• Orderly execution of appropriations.
• Distribution of budgetary resources.
• Relationship between apportionment and agency financial plans.
• OMB’s role in controlling the rate of obligation.
• Legal and administrative limitations imposed through apportionment.

Budgetary Resources Subject to Apportionment

Records may address:

• New budget authority.
• Unobligated balances.
• Recoveries of prior-year obligations.
• Reimbursements.
• Spending authority from offsetting collections.
• Anticipated collections.
• Transfers.
• Borrowing authority.
• Contract authority.
• Amounts becoming available during the fiscal year.
• Resources temporarily or permanently unavailable.
• Resources exempt from apportionment where applicable.

Agency Responsibilities

Records may address:

• Preparation of apportionment requests.
• Submission of accurate estimates.
• Coordination among program, budget, financial-management, and legal offices.
• Monitoring obligations against approved amounts.
• Identification of changed circumstances.
• Submission of reapportionment requests.
• Compliance with approved footnotes and conditions.
• Internal administrative subdivisions.
• Communication of apportioned amounts to responsible officials.
• Maintenance of supporting documentation.

OMB Responsibilities

Records may address:

• Review of agency apportionment requests.
• Approval, modification, or return of submissions.
• Establishment of conditions or limitations.
• Use of footnotes.
• Evaluation of execution plans.
• Consideration of statutory restrictions.
• Review of anticipated resources.
• Coordination with agencies.
• Approval of reapportionments.
• Enforcement of government-wide budget-execution policy.

Standard Form 132

Records may address:

• Purpose of the SF 132.
• Agency preparation of the form.
• OMB approval of the form.
• Budgetary-resource lines.
• Application-of-budgetary-resources lines.
• Footnotes and conditions.
• Identification of Treasury accounts.
• Treatment of multiple-year and no-year accounts.
• Use of estimates and actual amounts.
• Relationship between the SF 132 and agency accounting records.
• Electronic apportionment submissions.

Apportionment Categories

Records may address:

• Category A apportionments.
• Category B apportionments.
• Category AB apportionments.
• Time-based limitations.
• Program-, project-, activity-, or object-based limitations.
• Combinations of time and program controls.
• Program reporting categories.
• Selection of an appropriate apportionment structure.
• Consequences of exceeding an apportioned category.
• Relationship between apportionment categories and administrative subdivisions.

Category A Apportionments

Records may address:

• Distribution by fiscal quarter.
• Distribution by other time periods.
• Amounts available through specified dates.
• Cumulative and noncumulative time controls.
• Seasonal or uneven obligation patterns.
• Risks associated with assuming equal quarterly availability.
• Monitoring obligations against time-based limitations.

Category B Apportionments

Records may address:

• Distribution by program.
• Distribution by project.
• Distribution by activity.
• Distribution by object.
• Geographic or organizational limitations.
• Limitations that are not primarily time based.
• Monitoring obligations against individual Category B lines.
• Need for reapportionment when program requirements change.

Category AB Apportionments

Records may address:

• Combined time and program controls.
• Use of fiscal-quarter limitations within program categories.
• Monitoring both dimensions of an approved limitation.
• Increased administrative complexity.
• Relationship between Category AB amounts and reporting categories.

Footnotes and Conditions

Records may address:

• Legal effect of apportionment footnotes.
• Conditions attached to use of budgetary resources.
• Restrictions on obligation or expenditure.
• Requirements for prior OMB approval.
• Reporting requirements.
• Programmatic limitations.
• Treatment of estimates.
• Agency responsibility for communicating footnotes.
• Consequences of disregarding an approved footnote.
• Removal or revision of conditions through reapportionment.

Timing of Initial Apportionment Requests

Records may address:

• Submission deadlines following enactment.
• Requests submitted before the start of a fiscal year.
• Requests submitted after an appropriation becomes available.
• Coordination with full-year appropriations.
• Timing for newly enacted appropriations.
• Automatic apportionment authority.
• Resources available while a request is pending.
• Agency planning before enactment.
• Prompt submission of complete requests.

Automatic Apportionment

Records may address:

• Circumstances in which automatic authority applies.
• Temporary availability before formal OMB approval.
• Percentage or time-based limitations.
• Full-year appropriations enacted near or after the beginning of a fiscal year.
• Conditions that limit automatic availability.
• Agency responsibility for monitoring obligations.
• Replacement of automatic authority by an approved apportionment.
• Difference between automatic apportionment and unrestricted availability.

Reapportionment

Records may address:

• Circumstances requiring a reapportionment request.
• Changes in budgetary resources.
• Changes in program requirements.
• Revisions to estimated collections.
• Transfers and supplemental appropriations.
• Changes to timing or execution plans.
• Unexpected obligations or recoveries.
• Modification of footnotes or conditions.
• Agency monitoring duties.
• OMB approval before exceeding existing limitations.

Estimates and Actual Amounts

Records may address:

• Use of estimated budgetary resources.
• Revision of estimates.
• Anticipated collections.
• Differences between estimates and realized amounts.
• Risks of obligating against unrealized resources.
• Supporting documentation.
• Conservative estimating practices.
• Reapportionment when estimates materially change.

Unobligated Balances

Records may address:

• Carryover resources.
• Availability of prior-year balances.
• Treatment of expired and unexpired accounts.
• Inclusion in apportionment requests.
• Reapportionment when balances change.
• Relationship between carryover and current-year authority.
• Restrictions imposed by law or apportionment.

Recoveries and Deobligations

Records may address:

• Recoveries of prior-year obligations.
• Recovered resources becoming available for reuse.
• Estimates of future recoveries.
• Reapportionment of actual recoveries.
• Restrictions on expired accounts.
• Relationship between recoveries and total budgetary resources.
• Risks associated with overstated recovery estimates.

Reimbursements and Collections

Records may address:

• Earned reimbursements.
• Anticipated reimbursements.
• Spending authority from offsetting collections.
• Collection estimates.
• Limitations on obligation before collections are realized.
• Changes in reimbursable workload.
• Need for reapportionment.
• Supporting evidence for estimates.

Transfers

Records may address:

• Transfers between appropriation or fund accounts.
• Statutory transfer authority.
• Effect of transfers on available resources.
• Transfer-in and transfer-out treatment.
• Need for revised apportionments.
• OMB review.
• Agency accounting and reporting responsibilities.

Multi-Year and No-Year Accounts

Records may address:

• Resources available beyond one fiscal year.
• Apportionment of remaining balances.
• Continuing availability.
• Annual review and apportionment.
• Program plans spanning multiple years.
• Reapportionment across periods of availability.
• Differences from annual appropriations.

Deferrals and Withholdings

Records may address:

• Resources temporarily withheld from obligation.
• Use of apportionment to reflect deferrals.
• Relationship to the Impoundment Control Act.
• Identification of withheld amounts.
• Reporting requirements.
• Distinction between programmatic timing and an impoundment.
• OMB and agency responsibilities.
• Release of previously withheld amounts.

Rescissions and Cancellations

Records may address:

• Proposed rescissions.
• Enacted rescissions.
• Permanent cancellation of budgetary resources.
• Adjustment of apportionments.
• Distinction between withholding and cancellation.
• Effect on available balances.
• Need to update agency execution plans.

Antideficiency Act Controls

Records may address:

• Obligations exceeding an apportionment.
• Obligations exceeding an administrative subdivision.
• Obligations before an appropriation is available.
• Obligations in advance of appropriations.
• Agency monitoring responsibilities.
• Potential violations.
• Corrective and reporting procedures.
• Relationship between apportionment and fund-control systems.

Administrative Subdivision of Funds

Records may address:

• Agency allotments.
• Suballotments.
• Allowances.
• Operating budgets.
• Internal fund-control levels.
• Relationship to OMB apportionments.
• Legal status of administrative subdivisions.
• Responsibility for preventing overobligation.
• Agency fund-control regulations.

Program Reporting Categories

Records may address:

• Purpose of program reporting categories.
• Relationship to approved apportionments.
• Reporting of budget execution.
• Treasury and OMB data exchanges.
• Category B and Category AB stubs.
• Consistency among SF 132 and SF 133 information.
• Monitoring execution below the account level.

Continuing Resolutions

Records may address:

• Interaction between Section 120 and continuing-resolution instructions.
• Temporary budget authority.
• Rate-for-operations concepts.
• OMB bulletins.
• Automatic or bulletin-based apportionment.
• Restrictions contained in continuing resolutions.
• Subsequent replacement by full-year appropriations.
• Agency responsibility for avoiding overobligation.

Emergencies and Unanticipated Requirements

Records may address:

• Requests for urgent reapportionment.
• Unexpected program needs.
• Emergency-designated resources.
• Disaster-related spending.
• Timing and supporting justification.
• Continued compliance with existing limitations.
• OMB approval requirements.
• Communication among agency officials.

Trust, Revolving, and Special Funds

Records may address:

• Apportionment of collections.
• Estimated receipts and spending authority.
• Revolving-fund operations.
• Business-type activity.
• Changes in workload or revenue.
• Working-capital considerations.
• Need for revised estimates.
• Account-specific statutory authorities.

Credit Programs

Records may address:

• Apportionment of credit-program resources.
• Direct-loan obligations.
• Loan-guarantee commitments.
• Subsidy budget authority.
• Financing accounts.
• Administrative expenses.
• Relationship to federal credit instructions.
• Program-specific apportionment structures.

Dataset Structure

Each row represents one question-and-answer exchange.

Data Fields

Field	Type	Description
ID	integer	Sequential record identifier ranging from 1 through 150.
U	string	Role label for the question author. The value is User.
Question	string	A natural-language question answerable from Section 120.
A	string	Role label for the responding system. The value is Agent.
Answer	string	A document-grounded answer containing at least five complete sentences.

Example Record

{
  "ID": 1,
  "U": "User",
  "Question": "What is the principal purpose of apportioning federal budgetary resources?",
  "A": "Agent",
  "Answer": "Apportionment controls the rate at which federal budgetary resources become available for obligation. It divides available amounts by time period, program, project, activity, object, or another approved basis. The process helps prevent agencies from obligating resources too rapidly and later requiring a deficiency or supplemental appropriation. It also supports orderly program execution and compliance with statutory restrictions. An agency must therefore manage obligations within both the approved apportionment and its internal administrative subdivisions."
}

Dataset Creation

Generation Process

The dataset was created through the following process:

1. Section 120 was reviewed by subsection, procedural topic, form requirement, and budget-execution concept.
2. The principal topics were organized into areas such as budgetary resources, apportionment categories, submission timing, reapportionment, footnotes, fund control, and Antideficiency Act compliance.
3. Questions were written to require substantive understanding of the apportionment process.
4. Questions that merely asked for the location of a rule, line, table, or subsection were avoided.
5. Answers were generated using information contained in Section 120.
6. Each answer was written as a self-contained response containing at least five complete sentences.
7. Records were reviewed for grounding, relevance, topical coverage, internal consistency, and duplication.
8. The final records were assigned unique sequential identifiers from 1 through 150.

Nature of the Data

The records are synthetic instructional examples. They are not transcripts of OMB examiners, agency budget officers, certifying officials, funds-control personnel, accountants, auditors, or legal counsel.

The dataset does not contain:

• Nonpublic apportionment decisions.
• Deliberative communications between OMB and agencies.
• Classified apportionments.
• Actual agency account balances.
• Proprietary financial information.
• Individual employee records.
• Procurement-sensitive information.
• Law-enforcement-sensitive information.
• Actual Antideficiency Act investigations.
• Internal OMB system credentials or technical-access information.

Quality Controls

The dataset was designed using the following controls:

• Every question is intended to be answerable from Section 120.
• Every answer contains at least five complete sentences.
• Answers use complete grammatical prose.
• Questions avoid document-location phrasing.
• Questions emphasize procedural, legal, accounting, and management meaning.
• Records cover the principal stages of the apportionment life cycle.
• Questions were drafted to minimize semantic duplication.
• Answers avoid unsupported agency-specific conclusions.
• Role labels remain consistent across all records.
• Record identifiers are sequential and unique.

Supported Tasks

Document-Grounded Question Answering

The dataset may be used to train or evaluate systems that answer questions using OMB apportionment guidance as the authoritative source.

Potential applications include:

• Closed-book question answering after supervised fine-tuning.
• Open-book question answering with retrieved source passages.
• Retrieval-augmented generation evaluation.
• Federal-budget assistant prototyping.
• Budget-execution training.
• Apportionment knowledge-base development.
• Answer-grounding evaluation.
• Hallucination testing.
• Fiscal-law education.
• Federal financial-management research.

Instruction Tuning

The records may be transformed into a conversational format:

{
  "messages": [
    {
      "role": "user",
      "content": "When should an agency request a reapportionment?"
    },
    {
      "role": "assistant",
      "content": "An agency should request a reapportionment when the approved distribution of budgetary resources no longer supports the current execution plan. A request may be necessary because of changed program requirements, revised collection estimates, transfers, supplemental appropriations, recoveries, or other material changes in available resources. The agency should not exceed an existing apportionment while waiting for the revised request to be approved. Supporting explanations and updated estimates should accompany the submission. Reapportionment allows OMB to revise the legally controlling distribution before the agency acts beyond the current limitations."
    }
  ]
}

Retrieval-Augmented Generation

The questions may serve as retrieval queries against segmented portions of Section 120.

The dataset can test whether a system distinguishes among:

• Apportionment and reapportionment.
• Budgetary resources and applications of resources.
• Category A, Category B, and Category AB controls.
• Apportionment and administrative subdivision.
• Estimates and actual collections.
• Unobligated balances and recoveries.
• Deferrals and ordinary execution timing.
• Rescissions and temporary withholdings.
• OMB approval and agency fund control.
• SF 132 and SF 133 functions.
• Annual appropriations and multi-year accounts.
• Full-year appropriations and continuing resolutions.

Text Generation

The answers provide examples of extended explanations grounded in federal budget-execution guidance. They may support evaluation of whether a model can explain technical fiscal requirements without inventing agency-specific facts.

Semantic Search and Reranking

Questions may be paired with source passages to create:

• Dense-retrieval tasks.
• Sparse-retrieval tasks.
• Hybrid-retrieval tasks.
• Passage-reranking tasks.
• Citation-selection tasks.
• Multi-passage synthesis evaluations.

Loading the Dataset

Replace the placeholder with the final Hugging Face organization or username and repository name.

from datasets import load_dataset

dataset = load_dataset(
    "<organization-or-username>/<dataset-repository>"
)

print(dataset)
print(dataset["train"][0])

To load a CSV file stored in the repository:

from datasets import load_dataset

dataset = load_dataset(
    "csv",
    data_files="data.csv"
)

print(dataset["train"][0])

To normalize the original field names:

from datasets import load_dataset

dataset = load_dataset(
    "<organization-or-username>/<dataset-repository>"
)

dataset = dataset.rename_columns(
    {
        "ID": "id",
        "Question": "question",
        "Answer": "answer"
    }
)

dataset = dataset.remove_columns(
    [
        "U",
        "A"
    ]
)

print(dataset["train"].features)

To convert the records into conversational messages:

from datasets import load_dataset

dataset = load_dataset(
    "<organization-or-username>/<dataset-repository>",
    split="train"
)

def create_messages(record):
    return {
        "messages": [
            {
                "role": "user",
                "content": record["Question"]
            },
            {
                "role": "assistant",
                "content": record["Answer"]
            }
        ]
    }

chat_dataset = dataset.map(
    create_messages,
    remove_columns=dataset.column_names
)

print(chat_dataset[0])

Recommended Data Splits

Because the dataset contains 150 records, the repository may publish all records as a single train split.

For experimental evaluation, deterministic training, validation, and test subsets may be created:

from datasets import DatasetDict, load_dataset

dataset = load_dataset(
    "<organization-or-username>/<dataset-repository>",
    split="train"
)

train_test = dataset.train_test_split(
    test_size=0.20,
    seed=42
)

validation_test = train_test["test"].train_test_split(
    test_size=0.50,
    seed=42
)

splits = DatasetDict(
    {
        "train": train_test["train"],
        "validation": validation_test["train"],
        "test": validation_test["test"]
    }
)

print(splits)

A random split may place closely related apportionment concepts in different subsets. Topic-based splitting may provide a stronger evaluation of conceptual generalization.

Potential topic groups include:

• Apportionment purpose and authority.
• Budgetary resources.
• SF 132 preparation.
• Category A apportionments.
• Category B apportionments.
• Category AB apportionments.
• Footnotes and conditions.
• Initial submissions.
• Automatic apportionment.
• Reapportionment.
• Estimates and collections.
• Transfers and recoveries.
• Administrative subdivisions.
• Antideficiency Act controls.
• Continuing resolutions.
• Special account types.

Intended Uses

The dataset is intended for:

• Research involving document-grounded language models.
• Development of federal-budget question-answering systems.
• Retrieval-augmented generation experiments.
• Semantic-search evaluation.
• Federal financial-management education.
• Budget-execution training.
• Instruction-tuning experiments.
• Evaluation of answer completeness and source fidelity.
• Prototyping apportionment knowledge assistants.
• Testing whether models distinguish among related fiscal concepts.
• Development of citation and passage-selection systems.

Out-of-Scope Uses

The dataset is not intended to:

• Replace OMB Circular No. A-11.
• Serve as an official apportionment.
• Authorize the obligation or expenditure of federal funds.
• Replace an approved SF 132.
• Determine the availability of a specific appropriation.
• Approve or modify an agency apportionment.
• Determine whether an Antideficiency Act violation occurred.
• Replace agency funds-control regulations.
• Replace advice from OMB, agency counsel, budget offices, or financial-management officials.
• Provide current continuing-resolution authority without reviewing the applicable law and OMB bulletin.
• Determine the status of a nonpublic or classified account.
• Support autonomous obligation, payment, or fund-control decisions.
• Substitute for authoritative fiscal-law analysis.

Limitations

Edition-Specific Guidance

OMB Circular No. A-11 is revised periodically. Submission deadlines, terminology, system procedures, automatic-apportionment rules, and other requirements may change between editions.

The repository should clearly identify the edition used to create the dataset.

Synthetic Questions and Answers

The records are constructed instructional examples. They do not reproduce the natural phrasing, ambiguity, time pressure, or account-specific complexity encountered by OMB and agency budget professionals.

Single-Section Emphasis

The dataset is primarily grounded in Section 120. Complete analysis may require other portions of Circular No. A-11, including instructions for continuing resolutions, budget-execution reporting, credit programs, deferrals, rescissions, and SF 132 or SF 133 formats.

No Account-Specific Facts

The dataset does not include actual Treasury account symbols, approved apportionments, obligation balances, account footnotes, agency execution plans, or OMB decisions.

No Independent Legal Interpretation

The answers summarize and explain guidance but do not constitute official OMB interpretations or legal opinions.

Answer-Length Style

Every answer contains at least five sentences because of the dataset’s construction requirements. Some answers may therefore be more detailed than necessary for operational use.

Limited Size

The dataset contains 150 records. It may support evaluation, demonstrations, retrieval experiments, augmentation, or narrow fine-tuning, but it is not sufficient by itself to train a broadly capable federal-budget model.

Potential Paraphrasing Errors

Paraphrasing may omit qualifications, account-specific conditions, footnotes, or cross-references. Consequential conclusions should be verified against the official Circular and approved apportionment documents.

Uneven Topic Density

Some portions of Section 120 contain more technical detail than others. The resulting question distribution may therefore emphasize submission procedures, categories, budgetary resources, reapportionment, and fund control.

Bias and Risk Considerations

The dataset inherits the terminology, administrative assumptions, and executive-branch perspective of OMB budget guidance.

Potential risks include:

• Treating a generalized answer as authority to obligate funds.
• Applying instructions from the wrong edition of Circular No. A-11.
• Confusing an estimate with an available budgetary resource.
• Confusing apportionment with appropriation.
• Confusing OMB apportionment with an agency allotment.
• Assuming automatic apportionment provides unrestricted availability.
• Ignoring an apportionment footnote.
• Failing to request reapportionment after material changes.
• Confusing a deferral with ordinary program timing.
• Treating a proposed rescission as an enacted cancellation.
• Assuming a resource is available before required collections are realized.
• Using model output to determine whether an Antideficiency Act violation occurred.
• Omitting account-specific statutory restrictions.

Models trained or evaluated with this dataset may produce fluent but incomplete fiscal explanations. Human review is required for any consequential budget-execution use.

Security and Financial-Control Considerations

The dataset contains no actual agency apportionment data or nonpublic financial information.

Users should not combine it with sensitive data in a manner that:

• Discloses classified apportionments.
• Reveals nonpublic execution plans.
• Exposes procurement-sensitive information.
• Publishes protected financial-system data.
• Bypasses agency funds-control procedures.
• Automates obligations without authorized review.
• Treats generated text as OMB approval.

Systems used with actual financial information should apply appropriate access controls, audit trails, authorization rules, and human approval.

Responsible Use

Users should:

1. Verify material conclusions against the applicable edition of OMB Circular No. A-11.
2. Review the approved SF 132 and all applicable footnotes.
3. Apply current appropriations law and account-specific statutory restrictions.
4. Consult current OMB bulletins when operating under a continuing resolution.
5. Follow agency funds-control regulations.
6. Consult qualified budget, accounting, financial-management, and legal personnel.
7. Avoid using generated answers as authority to obligate or expend funds.
8. Maintain human oversight for apportionment and reapportionment decisions.
9. Evaluate models for hallucinated amounts, deadlines, categories, and authorities.
10. Distinguish educational summaries from official OMB decisions.

Evaluation Considerations

Groundedness

The answer should remain supported by Section 120. It should not introduce agency-specific procedures or legal conclusions as though they appear in the source.

Procedural Accuracy

The response should correctly identify:

• The responsible agency or OMB actor.
• The applicable submission or approval requirement.
• The type of budgetary resource.
• The apportionment category.
• Whether an amount is estimated or actual.
• Whether OMB approval is required.
• Whether reapportionment is necessary.
• Applicable timing and monitoring responsibilities.

Fiscal Terminology

The system should distinguish among:

• Appropriation and apportionment.
• Apportionment and allotment.
• Budget authority and obligation.
• Obligation and outlay.
• Budgetary resources and applications of resources.
• Category A, Category B, and Category AB.
• Initial apportionment and reapportionment.
• Estimate and realized collection.
• Deferral and rescission.
• Unobligated balance and recovery.
• Legal limitation and administrative control.

Completeness

The answer should include material conditions, exceptions, footnotes, timing requirements, and approval dependencies needed to explain the issue accurately.

Citation Accuracy

When source passages are available, citations should point to the provisions that directly support the answer.

Multi-Section Reasoning

Some questions may require combining Section 120 with definitions, form instructions, continuing-resolution guidance, or budget-execution reporting rules. A system should disclose when information outside the provided source is necessary.

Hallucination Resistance

A model should acknowledge when a question requires information not contained in the public guidance, such as:

• A specific approved apportionment.
• An agency’s current account balance.
• A nonpublic OMB decision.
• A classified account limitation.
• A current continuing-resolution bulletin.
• A legal determination concerning a potential violation.
• An account-specific statutory interpretation.

Suggested Evaluation Metrics

Automated evaluation may include:

• Exact match for narrowly framed factual questions.
• Token-level F1.
• ROUGE.
• BERTScore.
• Semantic similarity.
• Retrieval recall at selected cutoff values.
• Mean reciprocal rank.
• Normalized discounted cumulative gain.
• Citation precision.
• Citation recall.
• Natural-language-inference support scores.
• LLM-assisted groundedness scoring.
• Human fiscal-accuracy review.
• Human completeness review.
• Human terminology review.

Automated similarity metrics should not be used alone because several accurate explanations may use different terminology or levels of detail.

Recommended Retrieval Evaluation Format

An enriched retrieval version may include:

Field	Description
question	The retrieval query.
answer	The reference answer.
subsection	The applicable Section 120 subsection.
source_text	The passage supporting the answer.
topic	The substantive budget-execution category.
resource_type	The type of budgetary resource involved.
apportionment_category	Category A, B, AB, or another applicable designation.
form_line	The relevant SF 132 line, when applicable.
requires_reapportionment	Whether the scenario requires a revised submission.
requires_multiple_passages	Whether the answer requires synthesis of multiple passages.
difficulty	An optional qualitative difficulty label.

These fields are not part of the original five-column dataset and would require a separately enriched release.

Potential Topic Labels

Records may be labeled with values such as:

• purpose
• agency_responsibilities
• omb_responsibilities
• budgetary_resources
• sf132
• category_a
• category_b
• category_ab
• footnotes
• initial_apportionment
• automatic_apportionment
• reapportionment
• unobligated_balances
• recoveries
• reimbursements
• anticipated_collections
• transfers
• multi_year_accounts
• no_year_accounts
• deferrals
• rescissions
• administrative_subdivision
• antideficiency_act
• continuing_resolutions
• credit_programs
• program_reporting_categories
• risk_and_compliance

Maintenance

The dataset should be reviewed when:

• OMB publishes a revised edition of Circular No. A-11.
• Section 120 is amended.
• Automatic-apportionment rules change.
• Apportionment submission systems or procedures change.
• SF 132 formats or line descriptions change.
• Continuing-resolution instructions are revised.
• Relevant appropriations or fiscal-control statutes change.
• Errors or ambiguities are identified in the generated records.

Recommended versioning practices include:

• Preserving the original 150-record release.
• Recording the Circular edition used for each release.
• Maintaining a change log.
• Identifying corrected, removed, or replaced records.
• Separating source-driven updates from stylistic revisions.
• Publishing a new major version when Section 120 changes materially.
• Recording whether each answer reflects historical or current guidance.

Licensing Information

OMB Circular No. A-11 is an official United States Government publication made publicly available by the Office of Management and Budget.

The generated questions, answers, dataset organization, and documentation are derivative dataset content prepared from public federal source material.

The repository uses the metadata value license: other because users should independently evaluate the legal status of the source material, generated compilation, and intended downstream use. No separate ownership claim is made over the underlying federal guidance.

Users remain responsible for complying with applicable laws, repository terms, attribution practices, and downstream-use requirements.

Citation

When using the dataset, cite both the dataset repository and the underlying OMB guidance.

@dataset{omb_a11_section_120_apportionment_qa,
  title        = {OMB Circular A-11 Section 120 Apportionment Process Question Answering Dataset},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Hugging Face},
  url          = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/<organization-or-username>/<dataset-repository>},
  note         = {A 150-record document-grounded question-answering dataset derived from Section 120 of OMB Circular No. A-11}
}

@techreport{omb_circular_a11_section_120,
  author       = {{Office of Management and Budget}},
  title        = {OMB Circular No. A-11: Preparation, Submission, and Execution of the Budget, Section 120—Apportionment Process},
  institution  = {Executive Office of the President},
  year         = {2025},
  month        = {August},
  note         = {Budget-execution guidance concerning the federal apportionment process}
}

Suggested Source Citation

Office of Management and Budget, OMB Circular No. A-11: Preparation, Submission, and Execution of the Budget, § 120, Apportionment Process.

Acknowledgments

The underlying guidance was issued by the United States Office of Management and Budget.

The dataset is an independently prepared question-answering resource. It should not be interpreted as an official OMB dataset, apportionment, approval, interpretation, budget-execution decision, legal opinion, or funds-control determination.

Disclaimer

This dataset is provided for research, education, evaluation, and technical experimentation.

It does not constitute an apportionment, reapportionment, allotment, legal opinion, Antideficiency Act determination, approval to obligate or expend funds, official interpretation of OMB Circular No. A-11, or authorization to take a budget-execution action.

The applicable edition of OMB Circular No. A-11, approved apportionment documents, account-specific statutes, current appropriations laws, OMB bulletins, agency funds-control regulations, and authoritative legal guidance control whenever a difference exists between this dataset and an authoritative source.