The easier one to understand, I think, is the case of environmental liabilities, Doug's example. In the summary financial statements, the government goes through and assesses all of the sites—it has done studies—and says, we think the costs of remediation or whatever will be x billions of dollars, and we've recorded that as a liability, an amount that will eventually have to be paid to clean this up.
At the departmental level, all they're concerned with is how much cash they have in the year to clean up a site. This is probably putting it in simplistic terms, but they don't have that number for the overall future liability. They're not managing the future liability; they're managing the cash in their department.