Posted on 02/10/2025 5:18:10 PM PST by george76
Democrats have their panties in a wad over the work that Elon Musk and DOGE are doing to control government spending.
But despite all the hoopla, what’s actually going on is straightforward stuff that most people probably — but wrongly — assumed the government was doing all along.
...
Musk wrote on X Saturday that DOGE and the Treasury Department have agreed to take the following steps:
All outgoing payments must have a categorization code in order to be paid. That’s supposed to already happen, but Musk has found the code is often left blank, making audits nearly impossible.
All payments must have an explanation attached — another procedure that has been routinely ignored, making it hard to determine what or who federal payments are actually for.
Every payment must be checked against an up-to-date “Do Not Pay” list of known frauds, terrorist groups, deceased people and expenditures that do not match congressional appropriations.
“The above super obvious and necessary changes are being implemented by existing, long-time career government employees,” Musk noted. “It is ridiculous [these rules] didn’t exist already!”
...
Musk went on to express disbelief that more than $100 billion worth of entitlements every year are going to “individuals with no SSN or even a temporary ID number. If accurate, this is extremely suspicious.”
“When I asked if anyone at Treasury had a rough guess for what percentage of that number is unequivocal and obvious fraud, the consensus in the room was about half, so $50B/year or $1B/week
...
the Social Security Administration has no mechanism to prevent duplicate Social Security numbers from being issued — “which further enables MASSIVE FRAUD
...
problem isn’t incompetence. Maybe the system is in fact set up to facilitate fraud.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Both! No need to create a dichotomy here
“Incompetent or crooked?”
Hey NYP, you forgot “AND” in the title.
BOTH!! Definitely BOTH!
“Incompetent or crooked?” Not binary choice.
It is not necessary to ascribe malice to mere stupidity, but they work very well in tandem, if mischief is the result, whether intended or not.
BOTH. The incompetent made it EASY for the crooked to steal.
I don’t know. It seems they’re pretty competent at fraud.
+1
As a former bank auditor, it’s almost incomprehensible to me that there has been a total lack of internal controls over the payment system of the US Government; however, after what has gone on especially in the last 4 years, I find myself unsurprised.
Mostly crooked peppered with incompetence.
The New York Post seems to be coming around as of late.
Yes
There are no controls because the people who ran it did not want any impediments to their fraud and embezzlement.
And it appears not to matter which party is running the admin. I don’t consider Trump or Musk to be party guys. Absolute power would give BOTH absolute corruption and the lack of care which would be incompetence.
Both and then some. Criminal. Treasonous.
From a simple systems perspective and design, the category code should have been a mandatory entry field and validated against an acceptable values table. This would prevent blanks but not prevent mis-assigning a value however.
Indeed but government in general excels at incompetence too.
It was estimated that it would prevent some 90 billion in waste annually.
They turned it down.
I wonder if we are being taxed without representation
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