Bookkeeping: this isn’t even good enough for government work
And yet apparently it was considered just fine:
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) said on Feb. 17 that a total of $4.7 trillion worth of payments from the Treasury Department are almost impossible to trace because of missing account identification codes.
DOGE said the Treasury Department has assigned identification codes called Treasury Access Symbols (TAS), designed to note which account a Treasury payment is linked to, which DOGE said was a “standard financial process” for bookkeeping. However, the codes were not assigned for trillions of dollars worth of payments as the field was considered optional, according to the agency.
“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 stated on the social media platform X.
“As of Saturday, this is now a required field …”
Sloppy is an understatement. Then again, I guess they thought no one would ever check.
Well, someone did check:
DOGE reported that it found an estimated total savings of $55 billion on Feb. 17, which it said would come from a mix of “fraud detection/deletion, contract/lease cancellations, contract/lease renegotiations, asset sales, grant cancellations, workforce reductions, programmatic changes, and regulatory savings.” …
As of Feb. 17, DOGE placed the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) first in its list of top 10 agencies based on total contract savings, followed by the Department of Education and the Office of Personnel Management. DOGE said its reporting website will be updated twice per week.
The existence of this endless unaccountable money spiggot speaks volumes about the corruption and graft that surely exists within our Federal Bureaucracy. Nobody wanted to look too closely into where all that money was going, whether by design or simple lazy negligence. I doubt anyone around here is particularly surprised by this. The only (pleasant) surprise is that it’s finally being brought to light.
Not if the country’s Obama judges have any say in the matter…
(…a “right” they seem to have arrogated for themselves—but then who needs the Constitution anyway…especially when the Constitution is inconvenient to your cause and—YES—your ideology…AND your extreme need to protect “Biden”.
File under: America’s Chutnak moment?
“Biden” corruption “from the crypt”….
‘Pete Hegseth Says Biden’s IRS Targeted Him With “Total Sham” Audit On Their Way Out The Door’—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/pete-hegseth-says-bidens-irs-targeted-him-total-sham-audit-their-way-out-door
Sloppy is an understatement. Then again, I guess they thought no one would ever check.
Well, someone did check:
Nobody checked. That reminds me of an important story from yesteryear. 20 to 30 years ago perhaps. Then, there was amazingly some congressional oversight of the IRS. It was discovered that the IRS computers did make a record of every search that an IRS employee did, and recorded who’s financial information was accessed. Those files were then recorded on reels of tape which were then stored in a massive warehouse. Did anyone actually inspect those log files? Hell no!
So some Republican demanded that a random inspection of log files be performed. Lo and behold, numerous IRS agents were found to be snooping through celebrity files, without authorization, just for the fun of it. Or at least that was the claimed motive. Who knows if there were more serious motives involved, and more impactful targets?
It is certainly an interesting experiment in removing the agencies of central government and seeing what happens.
Once money draining institutions are gone it will be time to see where the power goes. If it is to the Sates that will produce one outcome…. If it goes to the Executive we may see something less pleasant.
To say Treasury does not follow Generally Accepted Accounting Principles would be an understatement. I suspect this will apply to the DoD and others.
This is inexcusable & beyond comprehension. Whoever is responsible for this will face no consequences. That the Republican Party–supposedly the party of small gov’t–allowed this to go on with little to no resistance–is damnable. People need to be called before Congress, put under oath & answer who authorized this insanity.
So what was the GAO doing all these years? Isn’t it their job to make sure this stuff can’t happen?
A billion here, a billion there… as Senator Dirksen once said.
About those IG’s that were fired. Didn’t do diddly sq, did they.
So Trump can’t fire someone else, per a Dem Judge. I wouldn’t bet on it in the long term.
Comments in local rag tend to be very anti Trump and Musk. I guess they really don’t care that their tax money was/is wasted.
If Trump would say, Hey about all that money being saved, how about a tax holiday.
Back in the day a friend of mine owned a local retail establishment. He would discount his prices and services fees in return for payment in cash. I’m not saying he did this so he could decide what amount to report as revenue/income on his tax filing, but that is how it usually worked out.
Bill Serra:
Is there any other political party conceivablly involved? Was it the Libertarian Party or the Party of No Affiliation or the Socialist Party of ‘murica? What is that other political party Bill? An enigma, a true mystery.
Kate – there is GASB – Government Accounting Standards Board. https://gasb.org/
But, I think it is only for state and local governments. Obviously, the US government doesn’t follow these standards.
Was it always like this or did something change like say during the Obama mal-administration. Tribunals come to mind.
@om
You might want to take a step back there. I read
as “Yeah, we expect the Democrats to be pulling this stuff, but it’s obvious that important parts of the Republicans were in on it, too, and we expected better from them.
”Yeah, we expect the Democrats to be pulling this stuff, but it’s obvious that important parts of the Republicans were in on it, too, and we expected better from them.”
The only Republican that has been in office since this was put into place is Donald Trump. If you want to blame a Republican — and a lot of people do — blame him. He’s the only one available.
Boobah:
And who is raising holy hell about it? It being the exposure of Federal Government malfeasence? Is it a bipartisan outrage and unified demand that DOGE be stopped? Are Republicans going to court with the Democrats? Or just the usual, sh*t on your own because they weren’t effective before?
Pork barrel politics isn’t a new thing. The Administrative (independent) state just expected to keep growing and ursurping control.
Good rant about about the audits and the resistance thereto: Educating the Stupid on How Audits Work In Real Life
We do recognize that there has been a domestic enemy worming its way through the government apple for 125 years, with the best results for them over the last 90 and then 15 years. But in the final analysis, all of this decrepitude is due to a feckless Congress not performing proper oversight and not giving themselves the level of subpoena powers they need to force compliance* with public (and occasionally secure) disclosures.
So the core question becomes why don’t people of competence and integrity want to run for office and provide a (relatively short) period of public service? And so many who do run end up giving up or getting compromised into spending 50% of their time soliciting campaign contributions and 20% beyond that accepting lobbyists’ favors. Maybe public servants should not want it so badly?
Given we do in fact live in a complex technological world, that will and does require some level of regulation, I perceive part of the answer may lie in bringing more of the bureaucracy under the legislative branch, so potentially more accountable.
We have been fed the story that maybe there is an 8%+/- issue involving waste and abuse, so it should be rooted out, but it is not big enough to be the “major” problem. DOGE is showing that something greater than 8% is involved, but who knows how high that number is.
We have to believe that this type of disclosure and correction of fraud and waste will enhance the election of non RINO’s and no Dems going forward. I doubt all that needs to be found and done and corrected can be accomplished in just 15 to 18 months, or even the next 4 years.
*If anyone has thoughts about how that might intrude on the Exec or Judicial branches, I welcome that discussion.
Successful lift-off and booster catch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kya9J7QQ3QE
@ Chuck > “Good rant about about the audits and the resistance thereto: Educating the Stupid on How Audits Work In Real Life ”
It’s Larry Correia at MHN (formerly MHI) so NSFW language abounds, even more than usual given the topic which is most certainly in his wheelhouse, but his observations are accurate IMO.
Most of the comments are great, giving a large amount of relevant anecdotal data on several facets of the DOGE tsunami.
Having been a business-based programmer and a teacher of same, I could relate to all of it, even the “Why, yes, there are still a lot of COBOL programs out there.”
I was on call in 1999 to fix some of them.
Best short comment from the link:
“The house is being cleaned. Yeah, some good and useful stuff is just going to be thrown out. But it’s a hoarder house.”
Family quasi-auditing anecdote: I had to take care of preparing a house for sale after some of our kids moved out of it, while simultaneously taking care of my mom in her final illness in a near-by town, so I “hired” our son who was majoring in accounting to supervise the work.
We would figure out how many people/companies he was going to use each week, and I would give him signed checks to disburse, as that was before universal credit card hand-held machines. The first time he turned kind of white, so I asked him if that was okay.
He replied, “I know it’s the only way to do this, so I’m personally saying “yes yes” but the accountant in me is screaming “NO! NO!”