The costs and financing of Expo.01 and Expo.02 remained a major issue right up to their dismantling.

The report of the Control Committee of the Council of States of 27.03.2001 describes the problems in the preparation and organisation of the national exhibition (Expo.01), particularly with regard to costs and financing, as follows:

The financial difficulties of Expo.01 were essentially related to the chosen concept. The details of the exhibition were to be developed in a creative, dynamic way over time. The infrastructure projects were also in a development and selection phase. Planning was based on the simultaneous engineering method, i.e. the projects were developed by the directorates in parallel and not on a timeline. There was also a lack of reliable information on the willingness of private sponsors and the expected entrance fees. Under these conditions, reliable budgeting was of course not possible in the first phase. The actual financial requirements only emerged when the exhibition was finalised. In October 1998, the office of the Strategic Committee learnt that sponsorship contributions of CHF 300 million were required (only CHF 175 million had been pledged, most of it in the form of letters of intent). This was the first time that people were surprised that the figures could not be determined more precisely at the beginning. 

According to the assessment of the Swiss Federal Audit Office, from today's perspective, a reasonable overview of the financial situation should have been possible for the first time at the time of the milestone at the end of April 1999. In fact, but not definitively, the financial requirements were clarified with Hayek Engineering's assessment of the situation in September 1999. Even if today, i.e. at Expo.02, the financial requirements can be reasonably surveyed, there are still uncertainties, mainly due to the uncertain income. This concept, which was chosen by politicians and concretised by the association, posed particular challenges for the financial management due to the unclear income and expenditure, which the management was unable to meet due to a lack of relevant experience.

^{From the report of the Control Committee of the Council of States of 27.03.2001 - Problems in the preparation and organisation of the 2001 National Exhibition (Expo.01)}