Using a formalism introduced by Feynman, Deser, Grishchuk, Petrov and Popova, the pseudotensors, such as de.ned by Einstein, Tolman, Landau/Lifshitz and Møller, are expessed as gauge dependent tensors in a background space, as the gravitational energy-momentum tensor of Deser, Grishchuk, Petrov and Popova. Using a result obtained by Virbhadra for the energy density in the Reissner-Nordström spacetime, it is shown that the action of these gauge transformations on the above tensorial expressions is the same as the action of the coordinate transformations on the equivalent pseudotensorial expressions, meaning that these tensors can be set to zero at a point by a suitable choice of gauge transformation.