Posted on 02/19/2025 7:00:00 AM PST by Rev M. Bresciani
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced Sunday that it had discovered approximately $4.7 trillion in government expenditures that are essentially untraceable due to missing account identification codes.
(Excerpt) Read more at new.americanprophet.org ...
could have been a juicier excerpt…
Ruh Roh! Bet some crooks are going to have a hard time sleeping tonight.
Without more, it’s going to be hard for those of us who are not forensic accountants to recognize the significance of this fact.
My daughter is just that. Would love to know just what she does know about this.
No codes entered for black budget items or outright theft of government funds.
BIG BALLZ RULEZ!!!!!!!!!!!
I love those guys!!!!!
We do love the sensational, but there does exist a chance that these self-promoting announcements are the equivalent of an eye not being dotted or a t not being crossed. The absence of these identification numbers may be insignificant if those expenditures do have an identification somewhere else.
I suppose everyone, particularly in Congress, would desperately love to see big numbers evolve from this activity that say they don’t have to do any cuts because the spending has already been eliminated. But before they can do that, there’s going to have to be a lot more than unsubstantiated claims like this.
I did not see one mention of any missing ID codes being found. Please point it out to me in case I missed it.
$55 billion out of a $2 trillion goal is like spitting inthe wind. Like deportations, just hardly a good start on the matter so far. I surely do wish them well though.
Seems as if incompetence, poor discipline, and laziness may over decades have crept into the culture of Fed Gov employees responsible for applying the noted spending codes.
Not saying corruption and fraud are not involved here—just that there may be a broad mix of causes, some malevolent, some otherwise, to leave government spending databases in such obvious disarray.
$4.7 trillion is close to the entire Federal Budget
But somewhere along the line, someone had to AUTHORIZE the disbursement.
Their butt is on the last signed dotted line !
It’s important that to follow through will have perp walks
I suggest asking a programmer if that field was ever used. You will find a lot of garbage in old systems
No blog pimping allowed.......
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The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced Sunday that it had discovered approximately $4.7 trillion in government expenditures that are essentially untraceable due to missing account identification codes.
In a post on X, DOGE announced that it had identified nearly $4.7 trillion in Department of the Treasury payments that did not have a Treasury Access Symbol (TAS) code associated with them, which are used to link payments to a budget line item. “In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible,” DOGE posted. “As of Saturday, this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going.”
During a joint press conference with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office last week, DOGE head Elon Musk referred to the missing ID codes as a primary reason why “departments can’t pass audits.” “[Y]ou can’t reconcile blank checks,” he observed. “You’ve got comment fields that are also blanks. You don’t know why the payment was made.”
Musk, the billionaire tech entrepreneur who was tapped by Trump to lead DOGE, went on to discuss other problematic aspects of the Treasury Department’s payment system.
“Then we’ve got this truly absurd … ‘do not pay’ list, which can take up to a year for an organization to get on the [list],” he explained. “We’re talking about terrorist organizations. We’re talking about known fraudsters, known aspects of waste, known things that do not match any congressional appropriation, [and it] can take up to a year to get on the list. And even what’s on the list, the list is not used. It’s mind-blowing. … [W]e’re really just talking about adding common-sense controls that should be present, that haven’t been present.”
In another X post published on Sunday, Musk highlighted an oddity present in the Social Security database that lists millions of individuals who have almost certainly passed away, including “more than 3.9 million in the 130-139 age range, more than 3.5 million in the 140-149 range and more than 1.3 million in the 150-159 range.” “Having tens of millions of people marked in Social Security as ‘ALIVE’ when they are definitely dead is a HUGE problem,” Musk noted.
As reported by the New York Post on Sunday, the issue has been known to the Social Security Administration (SSA) for some time. In two separate audits in 2023 and 2015, an SSA watchdog also found millions of individuals over 100 years of age in the system, but “[i]n both audits, the inspectors general concluded that ‘almost none’ were actually cashing Social Security checks — despite the glaring accounting errors identifying people born in 1886 and 1893 as still living, in two extreme cases.”
However, the audits “did reveal that around 531 million unique Social Security numbers are in circulation — and that ‘thousands’ may be in use to commit identity fraud.” For example, the 2015 audit “showed about $3.1 billion in earnings reported by employers or self-employed individuals who were not the actual Social Security number holder.”
Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for Economic and Social Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, told the New York Post that a vast black market of Social Security numbers of deceased individuals exists, in which illegal immigrants are “stealing identities of people who are deceased but not marked in the Social Security system.”
In all, DOGE has so far identified $55 billion in federal expenditures that have been targeted for elimination, according to an unofficial tally, with the goal of finding $2 trillion in government waste by July of next year.
Dan Hart
See post 15.
Posts like these are why we needed humblegunner.
Źzzzzzz. Keep telling yourself that
Those who did this may now be traced, even if the expenditure cannot be traced.
I would disagree, but only because of the total size of these dispersals would suggest a pattern of behavior to evade oversite.
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