The Antiplanner has previously argued that Amtrak uses “accounting tricks” to make the Northeast Corridor appear profitable and the system as a whole appear to cover most of its operating expenses out of revenues. The most important of these tricks is that it appears to count maintenance as a capital cost. As a 2001 Congressional Research Service report noted, “Under generally accepted accounting principles, maintenance is considered an operating expense,” but Amtrak excludes it when it compares operating revenues and expenses.
Recently, I met with an Amtrak official who explained that the situation is a little more complicated than I described. Historically, he said, railroads had counted maintenance against revenues when calculating their bottom lines, but this led some railroads to defer maintenance in order to improve their apparent profitability. As I understood his explanation, the Interstate Commerce Commission corrected this several decades ago by changing the accounting rules so that maintenance would be included in capital costs. This eliminated any incentive to defer maintenance.
I sort of understood that, but I’m not an accountant, so I looked up the history of ICC accounting rules. The best explanation was in a 2007 paper in the Accounting Historians Journal called “The End of Betterment Accounting.”
